


THE VARIOUS DEFINITIONS OF "TEAMWORK"

by rubyelf



Series: Various Definitions [2]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: BDSM, But We're Going To Try, Dubious Consent, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Past Abuse, People Being Obnoxious, Some of Us Are Not Good Team Players, Team Bonding, Team Dynamics, past trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-06
Updated: 2015-07-25
Packaged: 2018-01-23 19:03:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 40
Words: 136,612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1576217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rubyelf/pseuds/rubyelf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Now that the whole team is back to functioning (or whatever they do), it's time to decide what to do about some of the problems they've been handed to deal with. Such as 1) the guy locked in Tony's lab, and 2) not all of them are very good team players.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

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“So,” Steve said, looking at the others around the highly polished conference table, “now that all team members are back to functioning normally, we can…”

“Objection,” Clint said, raising his hand.

Natasha leaned back in her chair and glared at him. “What?”

“I object to the implication that there’s a single person on this team capable of functioning normally, ever.”

“I object to having to waste time listening to Clint be an ass when I could be working on stuff,” Tony said. “And what happened to the speaker phone that was in here?”

“I didn’t like it,” Natasha said. “Those things are incredibly easy to bug.”

“Who’s going to break into my conference room and put a bug in my speaker phone?” Tony asked, raising his eyebrows.

“If we need to make a conference call, JARVIS can patch us through a secure line,” she argued. “There’s no reason to have a…”

“Excuse me… can we actually have a meeting, please?” Steve interrupted.

“I agree,” Thor said. “I’m hungry, and I’ve been told that no one is allowed to have lunch until we’re finished.”

“You took my liquor cabinet out of here too, didn’t you?” Tony accused.

“You don’t need to drink during meetings anyway,” Bruce said.

“Yes, I do, and these people are why.”

Steve scowled and sat up in his chair. “We are going to have this meeting, and nobody is going to get out of it by acting like an idiot. I don’t care if we’re a team of superheroes or badly trained chimps… we still need to figure out at least one or two things that we have to do something about.”

“Fine,” Tony said. “What’s the first thing?”

“Loki.”

“Oh, you mean the fact that he’s still in my lab in an electrified holding cell and he’s starting to get grouchy about it?”

Thor shrugged dismissively. “He’s only been in there a few days. Considering how long his imprisonment in Asgard would have been…”

“Yeah, but we can’t keep him there,” Steve said. “We’re not in the business of taking prisoners, are we? I mean, neutralizing the threat at the time was understandable, but we can’t just keep him there indefinitely. As I see it, our options are to either return him to Asgard, where he already escaped once, or hand him over to S.H.I.E.L.D., who would really like to get their hands on him, but I’m not sure I’d like what they’d do with him.”

The others glanced at each other around the table, and eyes fell on Clint and on Thor; out of all of them, they were the two most emotionally invested in what happened to Loki, and none of them knew quite what either one was thinking.

“What are your thoughts, Natasha?” Steve asked.

She kept her eyes on Clint as she answered. “I work for S.H.I.E.L.D. I’m in enough trouble for hiding everything that happened to Clint from them, and particularly for letting Tony and Loki play with Tesseract energy without letting them know about it. So just because I’m tired of being bitched at and because I think he’s going to escape no matter where they put him, I’m going to say we should let S.H.I.E.L.D. have a shot at him. I don’t think they can do much worse than really annoy him anyway.”

Steve nodded. “Bruce?”

“I don’t work for S.H.I.E.L.D. and I don’t really like them a whole lot. If the Asgardians think they can actually keep him for more than a week this time, I’d go for sending him back there?”

“Okay. Tony?”

“I think we should just keep him down in the lab… teach him to do some tricks…”

“Damnit, Tony, we actually went almost five minutes without anyone being a dick,” Natasha snapped.

Tony attempted to look offended. “I was making a suggestion.”

“Fine. Your suggestion is stupid and your opinion is now invalid. Next…”

Steve shrugged and turned to Thor. “What do you think?”

“You know I would prefer my brother to face the justice that my own people chose for him,” Thor said. “However, since I cannot make excuses for their failure to keep him contained, I would not object if the team felt that S.H.I.E.L.D. would be able to do better.”

“Where are you on this?” Tony asked, before Steve could turn to Clint.

“Me?” Steve said. “I suppose that it would be my duty to turn him over to S.H.I.E.L.D., if it was my decision. But it’s not just my decision. Clint?”

Clint had been slumped in his chair, listening silently since the topic of discussion had turned to Loki.

“Been thinking about that,” he said slowly.

“Is that what you went and talked to him about last night?” Natasha asked.

Tony sat up sharply. “You were in the lab? JARVIS, why didn’t you tell me someone was in my lab?”

“Because I was informed that all restrictions on Agent Barton had been lifted, and I am not currently set to notify you if team members enter the lab, because you said…”

Tony waved his hand. “Yeah, yeah. Whatever I said. Okay.”

“Why did you wish to speak to my brother?” Thor asked, looking over at Clint with a puzzled expression. “You said nothing to me.”

Clint looked at the table. “I didn’t want you to tell me not to talk to him.”

“Why would you want to talk to him?” Bruce asked.

“Is this a meeting or an interrogation?” Clint snapped. “Nobody’s business but mine anyway. I figured we were going to have to decide what to do with him eventually, and I wanted to ask him some things. And not things anybody else needs to know about. But I’m satisfied… you can do what you want with him.”

“Clint…” Natasha said, waiting for him to look at her before she continued. “What do you want us to do with him?”

Clint crossed his arms.

“I say we let him go.”

Natasha raised an eyebrow. “Like, just open the door and let him walk out?”

“Yeah. Let him go.”

Tony rubbed his forehead. “And why would we do that? Actually, why the hell would you, of all people, want us to do that?”

Thor frowned and readied over to touch Clint’s arm as if to check and make sure it was really Clint and not some sort of mechanical replacement.

“You can’t possibly mean that.”

“I said it, didn’t I?” Clint said, defensive. “You asked my opinion and you got it.”

Mouths opened around the table, but Steve waved his hand and they closed.

“Yeah, we asked for your opinion,” Steve said, in his calmest and most easy Steve voice. “And now we’re sort of confused and it might help if you explained what you’re thinking.”

  
“Well, you said yourself, the Avengers aren’t about taking prisoners and stuff like that. That isn’t what we do. And Loki is a neutralized threat…”

“My brother is never a neutralized threat,” Thor muttered.

“He doesn’t have any of the powers or the tools or the army he had before,” Clint explained. “His family will throw him back in prison if he shows up in Asgard again. S.H.I.E.L.D. will use him as a science experiment if they get hold of him. And he’s got this Thanos, who apparently is some kind of big death-obsessed psychotic alien guy who wants to turn the universe into roadkill, looking to dish out some special punishment if he ever lays hands on him.”

“Why not send him back to Asgard to face justice?” Thor asked.

“First of all, it didn’t work the first time,” Clint said. “Second of all… I don’t think he’s evil. I think he’s just really, really messed up.”

“He killed a lot of people,” Natasha said.

“So did we,” Clint shot back.

“We had orders.”

“He had a mission,” Clint said. “At least, he thought he did. I don’t think he’s so sure anymore, after how badly it all went wrong. But he thought he had a purpose.”

“And did you forget that purpose involved mind-controlling you and doing you a lot of harm that you’re still recovering from?” Bruce asked.

“Yeah. Forgot all about that part.”

Bruce sighed. “I didn’t mean…”

“I know what you meant. But I don’t think anybody in Asgard’s going to do anything that will make him any less crazy… actually, they’ll probably just lock him up somewhere and let him go more crazy. And there’s another problem with keeping him, whether it’s on this planet or in Asgard, and you guys aren’t seeing it because you’re so busy worrying about punishing him for what he did to me.”

Natasha nodded slowly. “You’re thinking that this Thanos guy is going to come looking for him eventually.”

“Yeah. Him and whoever works for him. And I don’t know how big he is or how tough he is, but Loki doesn’t seem very confident he’s going to come out of it alive if they run into each other, and he’s a demigod. So…”

“Thanos is a formidable creature and capable of tremendous damage,” Thor said.

“How much damage?” Tony asked.

“I don’t know. We have not fought him. But…”

“But… you’re not sure you really want him showing up in Asgard in the middle of a dinner party looking for Loki,” Tony said. “And that means we’re probably not sure we want him showing up in the middle of some unsuspecting S.H.I.E.L.D. facility somewhere and killing everybody in it.”

“I think we’re starting to see your point here, Clint,” Steve said. “You’re thinking that as disarmed as he is, he’s less of a threat than the guys who are going to be coming after him, and they might be more than we want to deal with.”

“Keeping Loki here on Earth, or in Asgard, would just be waving a big sign inviting somebody to come and get him, and wreck a bunch of stuff doing it,” Bruce said. “If we let him go and he runs, there’s a good chance they won’t catch up to him, and at least they won’t come here to get him.”

Clint’s shoulders relaxed slightly as he realized the others were actually listening. “Well, think about it. You did something really stupid and it didn’t turn out at all the way it was supposed to… ever happen to any of us? Yeah. So you’ve done something stupid and now somebody really big and really bad wants your ass on a plate for it. Would you rather be sitting in prison waiting for him to come for you, or would you rather be cut loose to run for it and take your chances?”

Natasha shook her head and sighed. “As much as I can’t believe I’m saying it… the way you’re telling it, it’s the difference between making him a sitting duck or a moving target. And if it were me, no matter what I’d done, I’d at least want a chance.”

“Fury’s going to flip his shit,” Tony said. “I approve.”

“He escaped,” Bruce said, shrugging. “Not like he hasn’t done it before.”

Steve looked around the table. “Is this really what we want to do?”

“No,” Natasha said, “but I think it may be the best option.”

Thor turned to Clint again, concerned.

“Little Hawk… did my brother put this idea into your head when you spoke to him?”

“No,” Clint said. “Actually, he asked me to kill him and get it over with. He said at least I’d do it quickly, and that if Thanos catches him here, he’s going to torture him for a few hundred years before he finishes it.”

“You don’t think he really wanted you to kill him?”

“No… but I think he’s pretty much realized he’s in a lot of trouble and he doesn’t have a lot to defend himself with. I’m not talking about arming him and sending him out to kill more people… I’m just talking about opening the door and letting him make a run for it.”

“And what if he turns around and makes you regret that decision?” Natasha asked.

Clint shrugged. “Then he’s stupid. I’m not his biggest problem right now. And I know he’s crazy, but I don’t think he’s stupid. He knows Thanos is going to track the disturbance in the Tesseract energy to Earth, and if he’s still here when that happens, it’s not going to be good.”

“And what happens when Thanos shows up here looking for Loki?” Bruce asked.

“We shrug our shoulders and tell him the sneaky bastard escaped again, and tell him we think he went that way,” Tony said, pointing off into the sky somewhere. “Give him a cookie and wish him luck.”

Thor chuckled. “Honestly, I believe I can see you standing in front of Thanos and telling him exactly that.”

“Let’s hope he never gets the chance,” Steve said. “If Loki’s on the run and Thanos is chasing him, he’ll know he’s not here anymore.”

“So…”

“So, is that our team’s decision?” Steve asked.

No one answered.

“Okay. If that’s not your decision, say something.”

Silence.

“All right, then.”

 

 

Loki stepped out into the lab, straightening his clothes and looking around at the team standing assembled in front of him.

“I must say that I would like to know what sort of logic resulted in you deciding to allow me to go free,” he said. “I’m sure you could have something planned, but I don’t know that you’re that clever.”

“We can put you right back in there, asshole,” Tony said.

Loki shrugged. “It makes little difference. I will pay the price for my failure one day. It matters only how long it takes.”

“Well, we don’t want you here when Big Ugly comes to claim what he thinks is his,” Tony said. “So… you’re free. Get the hell out and don’t come back.”

Loki raised his eyebrows. “I assume my brother has explained to you that I cannot be trusted.”

“We’re trusting you to be more worried about saving your ass than playing games with a couple of humans,” Natasha said.

Loki contemplated for a moment. “I suppose that would be a reasonable assumption. Self-preservation is a rather persuasive argument.”

Thor sighed. “I wish you had not brought this upon yourself.”

“I wish many things had not happened as they did,” Loki said, and he glanced at Clint. “You are stronger than I thought a mortal would be.”

“Do you wish you’d killed me when you had the chance?” Clint asked.

“No. I do not,” Loki said, smiling slightly. “Something tells me that the idea to release your captive and let him fly to fight his own battles could only have come from a Hawk.”

Before Clint or anyone else could answer him, he vanished, leaving nothing behind but a moment of shimmering haze in the air where he had been.

The others stood for a moment, looking at the spot where he had been.

“You know that guy’s gonna be back,” Tony said.

“Yeah… but I’m not sure we’re going to be fighting him this time,” Natasha said.

Thor smiled. “I hold some small hope that one day my brother might be redeemed.”

Natasha glanced at Clint. “Maybe everybody deserves a chance at a clean slate.”

Clint shrugged. “We can’t really expect people to trust us in spite of everything we’ve done unless we’re willing to give someone else the same chance, can we?”

Tony raised his hand. “While we’re wiping slates clean, can I vote that everyone in the universe forgets about that thing that happened with those three girls at that one hotel in Vegas?”

“I didn’t know you had any shame,” Bruce said.

“I don’t. But it turned out not all three of them were girls and it was kind of an unpleasant surprise, and I’d rather…”

“You should probably stop now,” Natasha suggested.

“Ummm… yes,” Tony said. “I probably should.”

 

 

 

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	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Asgard insists that Thor make a trip home to explain the whole Loki business. Clint is bored. Bored Clint makes Natasha nervous, so she enlists a pair of very willing helpers to occupy him.

Thor wasn’t tremendously happy about being called back to Asgard to give an account of what exactly Loki had been up to and why exactly he hadn’t been returned promptly to his proper location. However, Fury insisted that, given that the diplomatic relationship between the two worlds was already a bit strained, what with the alien invasion of New York and all, it would be wise for Thor to go and play nice. And when Fury said it would be wise to do something, what he really meant was that it would be very unwise not to. 

Clint insisted that he certainly didn’t care if Thor had stuff to do, and stormed off when Natasha implied that he might be in trouble without someone to put him back in line on a regular basis. Tony had assumed at the time that Natasha had been deliberately pissing Clint off, since sniping at each other seemed to be a favorite pastime, but after Thor had been gone for a week, she cornered him on his way to the lab. 

“I didn’t do it,” he said quickly. 

“I know you didn’t,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Just because I’m talking to you doesn’t mean you’re in trouble.”

“No… but it usually does,” he pointed out, shifting toward the safety of his lab. 

“Don’t bother. JARVIS will open the door for me even if you lock it. I overrode your security codes three days after we got here. Now, will you shut up and listen for a minute?”

“Depends on what it’s about.”

She sighed. “Clint. And sex.”

Tony stopped moving. “You have my complete and undivided attention.”

“I thought that might do it.”

“Now, get to the part about Clint. And sex.”

“You haven’t noticed him starting to get a little…”

“Stir-crazy? I thought maybe he was bored. I mean, no crisis means nothing to do…”

“Yeah. And Clint doesn’t do well under those circumstances. Usually we’d be back out on a mission by now, but Fury’s not ready to test him under that kind of pressure yet… not that I blame him. So no mission, and no Thor to give him his adrenaline rush the other way, and it adds up to Clint being likely to do something he shouldn’t do. I mean, usually he can keep himself under control… we wouldn’t be agents if we couldn’t… but he’s still not balanced out from Loki’s head games and from everything else, and I think he’s started to get used to having Thor to take the edge off.”

“But we have no idea when Thor’s coming back. So basically, someone either needs to take him skydiving or something, or…”

“We’ve parachuted in the middle of the night into an Iranian minefield,” Natasha said. “Skydiving’s not going to do it.”

“I don’t know that Bruce and I can put him under like Thor can.”

Natasha smiled slightly, and for a moment Tony could see that her mind had wandered somewhere else entirely. 

“No… not quite. But you can still do something. And if nobody does anything, he’s just going to get bitchier and more wired till Thor comes back or we get to go put holes in something big and dangerous.”

Tony raised his hand in a salute. “I swear I will give this task the attention it deserves.”

“Yeah. I didn’t figure you’d complain too much.”

“Well, I’ll still have to convince Bruce, you know.”

 

 

“Why the hell would I say no to that?” Bruce asked, looking up from his lab bench and pushing back his welding mask. 

Tony shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“You know how much… I mean, you remember…”

“Your face is turning red,” Tony pointed out. “And don’t blame it on the welding. You know you want him in bed again just as much as I do.”

“I think that’d be a safe bet, yeah. Did Natasha ask Clint about this?”

“I highly doubt it,” Tony said, leaning back against the table behind him. “You know how pissed he’d be if he knew she was working behind the scenes to get someone to fuck his snarky attitude out of him?”

Bruce chuckled. “I suppose there’s no reason to worry about what Thor will say…”

Tony straightened up and did his very best Thor impression, complete with booming voice and squared shoulders. 

“Yes, my friends! I very much approve of you fucking our little Hawk while I was absent! It will be most entertaining to hear about, and I…”

“Seriously?” Clint said. 

Both of the scientists spun to face him; he had just walked around one of the walls of humming servers and was now watching them with raised eyebrows. 

“That’s not a bad imitation,” Clint said. “But I’m a little curious about the context.”

“It’s not what it…” Bruce attempted. 

“Umm… Thor’s gone and we would really like to fuck you?” Tony said. 

Bruce covered his face with his hands. Tony grinned. Clint looked at them for a long moment, his face completely unreadable. 

“Actually…” he said finally, “that’s sort of what I came down here for.”

Bruce glanced through his fingers. “Really?”

“Well, not exactly fair for you two to be having fun together and me left to sit around and entertain myself, is it?”

“That is a terrible, terrible waste,” Tony said. “You should really come up to my room and let Bruce and I start remedying that situation as quickly as possible.”

Clint smirked. “You think you can entertain me?”

“I think we can definitely make a very, very good effort.”

 

 

Normally, Tony liked to get from one place to the other as fast as possible, but there had been a few occasions when he wished the elevator between the lab and the private rooms moved a little slower. For example, he wouldn’t have minded another minute or so of he and Bruce managing to pin Clint into a corner of the elevator (not with much resistance from Clint) and engaging in a minor scuffle over who could get more of themselves pressed against him. But the elevator stopped, and after a moment JARVIS broke in. 

“Gentlemen, if you have failed to notice, you have arrived at your destination.”

Tony reached down and ran the palm of his hand along the hardening length of Clint’s cock through his jeans. “Yup. Destination right here.”

“Sir, do you wish me to direct the elevator elsewhere?”

“No… I wish you to shut up,” Tony muttered, as Clint’s attempt at a response was muffled by Bruce’s mouth over his own. After a moment, he managed to turn his head and grin at Tony. 

“I’ve done this in a lot of different places, and I can tell you from experience that elevators are not the worst place for it, but they’re definitely not the best.”

Bruce cocked his head. “Places like what?”

Clint grinned. “After a mission, you feel like your head’s going to explode if you don’t do something to burn off all that adrenaline. So… wherever you are.”

“Less talking,” Tony said, dragging Clint out into the hall with Bruce still half-attached to him. “More going to my room. Zero commentary from smartass omnipresent computer system required.”

“Yes, sir,” JARVIS replied. 

They had made it halfway down the hall, in an extremely inefficient manner that seemed to involve a lot of buttons and zippers coming undone, when Tony realized Bruce had stepped back and taken his hands off Clint, and while Tony couldn’t quite manage to take his hands off him, he at least managed to pull his mouth away from Clint’s throat so he could look at him. 

“You okay?”

Clint looked back at him with eyes that had suddenly gone cold gray and wary. 

“Yeah.”

“No,” Bruce said. “You want us to stop?”

“Just…” Clint said, then hesitated for a moment, and Tony felt a jab of guilt, because yeah, it wasn’t like Clint had been through any kind of serious shit in the past month or so, not to mention the rest of his life, and maybe they could have taken it a little easier. 

“Look, we can…”

“I’m not anybody’s fuck-toy,” Clint muttered. 

Bruce shook his head. “Nobody said you were.”

“I’m just saying… I’m not anybody’s fuck-toy. I mean, I know…”

“Clint,” Tony said, and Bruce held his breath, because Tony had that look on his face where he was going to say one of Those Things and Those Things could be surprisingly insightful, but they could also be astoundingly offensive, depending on Tony’s reading of the situation. Clint looked at Tony and frowned. 

“What?”

“I swear, with complete and total honesty… that if I wanted a fuck-toy, I’d hire one that knew how to shut the fuck up and not be such a pain in the ass at meetings.”

Bruce exhaled, and Clint laughed. 

“Seriously, you’re way too obnoxious to be a professional fuck-toy,” Tony said, grabbing him by the shirt and tugging him toward his room. “Even as an amateur, I have to imagine that your constant bitching and your habit of puncturing people with sharp objects and disappearing into the ventilation system wouldn’t go over well. Then again, it’s hard to find good help in New York these days, so…”

“Shut up,” Clint retorted, and kissed him. 

They managed to make it to the bedroom eventually, and door had barely closed behind them before Clint had both of them by the shirts and was dragging them toward the bed. They tumbled onto it in a pile, tugging at shirts and jeans and pulling off shoes and socks, accompanied by muttered curses and attempts to get mouths onto newly bared skin. 

“Easy, there,” Bruce laughed, sitting back on his knees. “It’s not like we have to be somewhere in five minutes or something.”

“JARVIS, set the status of everyone in this room to ‘do not disturb, for any reason, including the building being on fire’,” Tony said. 

There was no response. 

“JARVIS?” Tony demanded. 

“I beg your pardon, sir. I was following your request.”

“What request?”

The answer wasn’t JARVIS’s voice, but a recording of Tony’s. “Zero commentary from smartass omnipresent computer system required.”

Tony rolled his eyes. “My AI is butthurt. Did you even know computer systems were capable of being butthurt?”

Bruce chuckled. “You programmed him, and nobody gets pissy faster than you.”

“Would you stop arguing with the voice in the ceiling and get back to what we were doing?” Clint protested. 

Tony was vaguely aware of Bruce getting up and going to get something out of a drawer somewhere, and something in the back of his head recalled that he didn’t actually look in most of his drawers very often, but the rest of him was much too occupied with rolling Clint onto his back and pinning him down and kissing him extremely thoroughly, and having Clint’s very muscular legs wrapped around him in response. 

He was sharply returned to reality by a metallic clicking that was probably a little more familiar than he wanted to admit, and was directly behind his head, and when he tried to pull away from Clint to figure out what the hell was going on, he felt cold metal against the back of his neck. Clint grinned at him, and Tony managed to turn his head enough to realize that Bruce had taken it upon himself to handcuff Clint’s hands. 

“Hey! What… where did you get handcuffs in my room? And… hang on a second…”

He attempted to roll the two of them, which was a bit difficult, since Clint could easily have lifted his hands over Tony’s head but seemed to think it was much funnier to keep them where they were. He had only managed to roll them halfway before he felt cold metal click around his own wrists, locking his arms around Clint. 

“Fuck. Really? Are you serious?”

Bruce smiled.

“What the fuck are we supposed to do if we’re handcuffed together?”

“You, Tony, are supposed to shut up,” Bruce said. 

Clint laughed and braced his knees against the bed and rolled them again, until Tony was on his back with Clint’s legs planted on either side of his thighs and Clint’s cock hard against him. Bruce nodded his approval. 

“Why do I have to be on the bottom?” Tony complained. 

“Because I said so.”

There really was only so much complaining Tony could do, though, especially because Clint felt unreasonably good pressed against him like that, and it did put his lips and neck and shoulders within easy reach of Tony’s mouth, and Clint did make very interesting noises when Tony dragged his teeth across his skin. 

He made even more interesting noises when Bruce started working on him, and Tony had to smile because he knew Bruce always did this part with an infuriating, agonizing, mind-blowing thoroughness that would have you just about ready to go through the ceiling before he was finished. Clint’s response was fairly similar to Tony’s usual one, whining and pressing back against Bruce’s patient fingers in a desperate but futile attempt to get him to speed things up. But while it was torture to be the one on the receiving end of Bruce’s methodical preparations, Tony had to admit that it was actually extremely enjoyable to be intimately wrapped around someone else while they were forced to tolerate it. 

“Was this your plan all along?” he asked. 

He heard Bruce’s chuckle in response. “Yeah. For all of the fifteen minutes or whatever since you mentioned it to me.”

“If you don’t stop fucking teasing me I’m going to break these handcuffs and stick an arrow in your face,” Clint muttered, his breath hot against Tony’s shoulder. 

“Threatening people doesn’t get you anywhere,” Bruce chided. 

“Actually, it usually works pretty well for me,” Clint said. 

“Works better when you’re armed,” Tony suggested. “And also when you’re not naked and handcuffed to someone.”

“Fuck you,” Clint managed, gritting his teeth as Bruce obligingly stopped teasing him and started working his cock into him. 

“You bitch an awful lot,” Tony said. 

Clint attempted to respond, but all he could manage was a gasp as his head fell forward against Tony’s shoulder, bearing his neck and throat to Tony’s busy mouth. As Bruce set a steady pace and Clint’s commentary was reduced to low moans and a steel grip with sweaty hands into Tony’s hair, Tony found the small bruises he’d already inflicted, added some new ones, and then, when this drew sharp cries from Clint, sank his teeth in harder, leaving reddened indentations in the skin, then licking over them to soothe the sting as Clint twisted against him, chest rising and falling rapidly. 

“Do that… more…” he forced out. 

“I think I’ve already gotten about every inch of your skin I can reach,” Tony said. “Now, if Bruce would be kind enough to un-handcuff me…”

“Busy,” Bruce muttered, and rocked Clint’s body harder against Tony’s until all Tony could do was arch up and give Clint something to thrust against as he buried his face against Tony’s skin to muffle a shout as he came. Tony felt Bruce’s rhythm falter and heard the quiet sound that was usually the most noise Bruce ever made in bed unless Tony worked really, really hard to get more out of him. 

After a minute, as Clint’s breathing evened out and he slumped contentedly against Tony and the sticky mess between them, Bruce sat back, retrieved the handcuff keys, and released Tony’s wrists, then reached behind his head to unlock Clint’s. Tony stretched his arms out, but Clint’s hands remained tangled in his hair, and Clint murmured something unintelligible in his ear. 

“Hey…” Tony protested. “When do I get my turn?”

“Eventually,” Bruce said. “You could stand to learn some patience.”

“Patience? You’re an asshole. That’s not fair.”

“I thought you said I bitched a lot,” Clint said. “And you made a mess of my neck. I’m going to have bruises everywhere and Natasha’s going to be a massive pain in my ass about it and make fun of me until they go away.”

“I didn’t hear you asking me to stop while I was doing it.”

Clint shrugged. “Yeah, well… you know.”

He rolled to the side and flopped onto his back, stretching his arms. Tony glared at Bruce.

“How long are you going to make me wait for my turn?”

“Not too long. Just long enough for you to get really pissy about it.”

“Fuck off.”

Clint glanced at the handcuffs Bruce had tossed onto the bed. “Out of curiosity, what else have you hidden in Tony’s room that he doesn’t know about?”

“Oh, a few things…”

“Anything interesting?”

Bruce grinned. “Possibly. Let me go check.”

“Oh, no,” Tony said, rolling away. 

“Oh, yeah,” Clint said, pulling him back and pinning him down. “We’ll play nice. Probably.”

“Bruce won’t. He’s going to torment me. I can see that look in his eyes.”

“That’s okay. That sounds fun too.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many, many thanks to those of you who have made the start of this new project go so well! I'm extremely honored that so many people followed me over here from the last story, and even more honored to welcome any new readers aboard. I very much appreciate everyone who takes the time to read, and just wanted to let you know that!


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tony commemorates an occasion by trying to drink himself under the table. Except that this year, he's not alone, and whether he likes it or not, his team members have learned to understand him (and each other) better than any of them would have expected.

Tony didn’t bother to turn around or look up from his drink to see who was approaching the bar. In retrospect, he probably should have, since it was 4:00AM and not many people usually bothered him here, at the top of the tower overlooking the city through a wall of floor-to-ceiling glass. Clint came up here sometimes just to get out on the balcony and enjoy the height and the wind blowing past him, but Clint only came up here when he knew no one else was around. Nobody was coming to drink with him; Clint didn’t drink because of his father, and Bruce didn’t drink because he was afraid it would give the Other Guy a chance to get loose. Natasha did drink, and could probably hold her own against him without much trouble, but if she was awake at 4:00AM, she was in the training rooms, not at the bar. Thor had no objection to drinking, and drinking large amounts of anything that was offered to him, but he was still in Asgard, as evidenced by Clint’s foul mood and the lack of the loud, cheerful voice echoing through the building. And Steve didn’t drink because he was Captain America and all that. 

So it was with some surprise that he looked over and discovered that it was, in fact, Steve sliding onto the barstool next to him, looking out the windows at the city instead of at him.

“What are you doing here?”

Steve shrugged. “I don’t sleep much.”

“Yeah, but what are you doing here as opposed to… you know… doing stuff?”

“Making sure you’re all right.”

Tony raised an eyebrow. “I’m drunk. That’s normal. Is that all, Captain?”

Steve sighed. 

“Look, how did you even know I was up here?”

“When I wake up early, I ask JARVIS if anyone else is awake. Sometimes Natasha is up, or Thor, and they’ll spar with me for a little while before breakfast. JARVIS said no one was awake but you and you were up here.”

“I’m not in any shape to spar with you. Unless I put the suit on, and then I…”

“I didn’t come up here to ask you to spar with me,” Steve said. “JARVIS told me what today is.”

“Tuesday?”

“The anniversary of the day your parents both died.”

Tony rolled his eyes. “Thanks, JARVIS. Fuck off.”

“Sir, the date of your parents’ death is public information and I was not aware that you wished it to be considered classified,” JARVIS answered. 

“Like I said. Fuck off.” 

“I wasn’t trying to be nosy,” Steve said. “I just wanted to make sure you were all right.”

“Just fine.”

“How long have you been drinking?”

“A while.”

“Maybe you should go to bed.”

“Maybe you should fuck off, too.”

He expected Steve to be offended enough by this to go away, but he didn’t budge. “What if something attacked us right now, and you were too drunk to do anything about it?”

“Bad luck for the world, I guess. I can’t be ready to save it all the time.”

“You’re not interested in anything I have to say, are you?”

“Not really. And if you’re here to start about how my dad was a great man and all that horseshit, take it somewhere else… he might have been a great man but he was just as shitty at being a father as I am at being a normal human being.”

“Fair enough,” Steve said, but he stayed where he was, watching Tony pour himself another drink. “Can I ask you about something else, then?”

“If it doesn’t have anything to do with my parents or drinking, go for it.”

Steve’s face turned slightly red, and that piqued Tony’s interest enough to get him to set his glass down at sit up a bit. 

“Okay, then… when did you… you know, change your mind… about women? I mean…”

“Change my mind about women? What about them?”

“About… sleeping with them.”

Tony chuckled. “I didn’t.”

“But… Bruce. And Clint. I thought…”

“Thought what? Since when do you have to pick one or the other? I like women. I’ve always liked women.”

Steve sighed. “I guess I’m still getting used to the whole thing where it’s okay for men to sleep together…”

“Well, not everybody thinks that’s okay,” Tony said. “Although a lot more people do than they did back before you were frozen. But it’s still not something everybody’s okay with. A lot of people still aren’t.”

“But you… don’t care, or…”

“If I’d ever cared what people thought of me, I’d probably have killed myself by now just from reading the kinds of things that get published about me all the damn time in all the papers and magazines and shit.”

“Do you… miss sleeping with women?”

Tony cocked his head, trying to consider the question through the alcohol fog. “Not really. And Bruce wouldn’t... hang on, now. I’m not sharing personal business just because I’m drunk.”

“I won’t say anything,” Steve said. 

Tony shrugged. “Bruce doesn’t even really seem to be sure he should believe that anybody would voluntarily want to be with him. And I usually fuck things like this all up. I don’t want him to think… you know, that he’s not enough for me or something.”

“But that’s what I mean. Wasn’t it always women before?”

“Mostly,” Tony said. “But that’s kind of not the point. I mean, Bruce… he doesn’t have to ask me all kinds of stupid questions about why I do things or why I am the way I am. He just knows. Nobody else is like that.”

“Maybe that’s why when you weren’t in bed this morning I knew to look here,” Bruce’s voice came from behind them, and both of them turned to see him standing by the elevator, arms crossed lazily, smiling. 

“JARVIS, are you EVER going to stop letting me run my mouth about people when they’re already here and can hear me?” Tony demanded. 

“No, sir. I am not programmed to.”

“Haven’t you had about enough for now?” Bruce said. 

“Not even close.”

There was a clanking sound from overhead, and then a thump as Clint popped the cover off one of the ceiling vents and landed in a battle-ready crouch on the polished floor, looking around. 

“What the hell are you doing?” Tony asked. 

“Seeing what’s going on,” Clint said. 

“We have an elevator,” Steve pointed out. 

“I have informed Agent Barton of this fact numerous times,” JARVIS said. “He seems to prefer breaking pieces of the ventilation system.”

“I only broke it a little bit.”

Bruce glanced at him, and Clint glanced back, then looked over toward Tony, and there seemed to be some kind of communication between them that Tony caught a hint of. 

“What? Are you two planning something?”

“Who’s planning what?” Natasha asked, stepping off the elevator. “No one’s allowed to plan anything without me.”

“What the hell is this?” Tony complained. “I can’t even get drunk by myself anymore?”

“Nope,” Bruce said cheerfully. “Teamwork. You’re stuck with it.”

“Why is Natasha here?”

“Because JARVIS told me everyone else was here.”

“JARVIS, I’m going to have you deactivated.”

“That’s not necessary, sir. I am only following the protocols…”

“Fuck your protocols. And fuck all of you. Go away and leave me alone. I’m a grown man and I’ve been managing just fine for a long time without all of you up my ass…”

“Yeah. The same way the rest of us were managing fine without each other up our asses,” Bruce said, hooking an arm around Tony’s waist. “We all know how to be alone. Doesn’t mean we have to be.”

Tony scowled, but draped an arm over Bruce’s shoulder. Clint appeared at his other side, waiting, apparently in case Bruce accidentally dropped him. 

“Off to bed,” Bruce said. “I’m going back to sleep for a few hours. Four in the damn morning is way too early for me.”

Natasha shook her head. “Sissies. Steve? Ready for some sparring?”

“Ready when you are.”

“What… you don’t want to spar with me?” Clint demanded. 

“Go give Bruce a hand,” Natasha said. “You know… in case Tony doesn’t feel like cooperating.” 

 

 

Tony seemed willing enough to cooperate, though, and allowed Bruce to escort him to the elevator and off to his room, where Bruce and Clint rolled him into bed, pried off his shoes, and left him to sleep. Bruce pulled out one of the two chairs at the small table by the window and motioned for Clint to have a seat in the other one. Clint perched impatiently, his feet on the chair, sitting on his heels. 

“What are you doing sneaking around in the utility ducts again?” Bruce asked. 

Clint glanced over at Tony. “Is he out?”

“I think he was out before we got his shoes off. Why?”

“I saw Steve go upstairs to talk to him, so I went to listen.”

“Why? Are you just that nosy?”

Clint rolled his eyes. “Like I really give a shit what they want to fuss at each other about. You really want to know… Fury called a couple of days ago and assigned Natasha and I to keep an eye on the team dynamics… particularly any challenges to Steve’s leadership, since Fury picked him as the team leader for a reason and all.”

“He told you to spy on us?”

“He didn’t have to. We’re spies. That’s what we do. Besides, you know there’s no privacy in this building. JARVIS sees everything anyway. I could’ve just got his recording of the conversation, but… I was bored.”

“For what it’s worth, I don’t think Tony’s challenging Steve’s leadership… not on purpose, anyway. I think Tony just challenges everything. It’s just kind of how he’s wired.”

Clint shrugged. “So what were you doing up there?”

“I figured I’d find him there… I knew today was the day his parents died, and JARVIS told me he usually commemorates that by drinking enough to end up passed out on the floor, so I thought I should at least make sure he ended up passed out in a bed. Your back doesn’t hurt as bad in the morning.”

“Thoughtful of you.”

Bruce looked over at him. “Your parents both died in a car wreck, didn’t they?”

Clint shrugged, tipping his head back to study the ceiling. “Everybody knows that. Public record. My dad was drunk. Like usual. My mom was in the front with him and my brother and I were in the back seat. He didn’t care if he killed all four of us, so I don’t care if he managed to just kill the two of them. They deserved it anyway.”

“I’d ask why, except you’d tell me if you wanted me to know.”

“That’s public record too. It’s all in my file,” Clint said, shifting on his feet. 

“Doesn’t mean you want me to know about it.”

“First thing I thought after the car hit the tree was whether I was alive or not. And then I looked over at my brother, and he was alive; he was staring right back at me. And then I looked in the front seat and I saw what happened to my parents, and the next thought in my head was, ‘Well, that’ll be the last time the fucking bastard hits me’.”

“That happen a lot?”

“There wasn’t ever any time when it didn’t happen,” Clint said, his voice even and emotionless. “If he was awake and home, he was beating on one of us. Usually me. I was smaller. Always small for my age. He deserved exactly what he got. And she deserved it too.”

“Why did she deserve it?”

“Because she sat there and watched him beat us. Because she tossed us into the back seat and took us off in the car with him when he was so drunk he could hardly talk. If she didn’t care about us enough to protect us, fuck her… she deserved it too.”

“Maybe she was afraid of him,” Bruce said quietly. 

“You can’t stand back and watch people you love get hurt just because you’re afraid,” Clint argued, finally looking at him. “Someone was supposed to protect us. We were little kids. No one protected us. No one cared. No one’s ever cared. The Children’s Home didn’t care. The circus didn’t care.”

“Someone cares now.”

“Natasha cares, in her own way, but what they did to her was so much worse than anything my parents did to me…”

“I care. Tony does too, even if he’s an idiot about it. And Thor obviously does…”

Clint almost smiled. “Yeah. He’s not exactly… subtle.”

“No. Not the first word that comes to mind when I think of the God of Thunder.”

They sat quietly for a few minutes, listening to Tony snoring softly from the bed. 

“Not that it matters, but you know about my father, don’t you?”

Clint nodded. “We got the file on you when they first looked at recruiting you.”

“So you know I… have some idea.”

“Yeah. And I know about Tony’s dad, too. I guess even really brilliant guys aren’t always the people we’d like to think they are…”

“And then,” Bruce said, glancing over at Tony, “there are the really brilliant guys who don’t want you to know who they really are because they’re afraid they’re not who people think they are… and they don’t realize they’re so much more than they let people think they are.”

“Nobody cares who I am,” Clint said. “Agents aren’t supposed to be people you get to know.”

“We know as much as you’ll let us,” Bruce said. 

“Yeah, or as much as Natasha will blab because she thinks it will help me.”

“Well, you’re still not back on missions. Does that mean they don’t think you’re recovered yet?”

Clint scowled, but finally let himself slide down into the chair to sit like a normal person. “You didn’t read the reports?”

“I don’t read anything I’m not told to read. It’s not my business.”

“The doctors at S.H.I.E.L.D. saw me a week ago and told Fury to keep me off duty for another month. Said I’m still showing signs of neurological and psychological compromise.”

“Well, it was…”

“I’ve always been compromised,” Clint said, shaking his head. “They just never looked this close before. We’re all compromised.”

“But we’re all here,” Bruce said. “And we all know what it feels like, in different ways. You’ll get back out on missions eventually. And I’m still ready to go out and fight next to you right now, if something showed up.”

“You wouldn’t be worried about me not being able to handle it?”

Bruce smiled. “As far as I can tell, you’re going to absolutely wreck the next thing that puts itself in front of you just out of boredom and annoyance. I don’t think there’s anything you can’t handle.”

“I couldn’t handle having someone in my head again,” Clint said quietly. 

“That’s not going to happen,” Bruce said. “We would get you back.”

“S.H.I.E.L.D. was trying to get me back before I did too much damage…”

“No… we wouldn’t try. We WOULD get you back. We would break every single thing between you and us until we got you back. We wouldn’t stop and we wouldn’t follow any other orders or play anyone else’s games until we got you back.”

“Why?”

“Because we’re a team. And without you, we’re missing a piece.”

Clint leaned back in the chair and exhaled slowly. “You know… doesn’t Tony have liquor in here?”

“He keeps it stashed in the cabinet up there. He knows you don’t like the smell.”

“I think maybe you and I should have a drink.”

“What for?”

“A toast,” Clint said. 

Bruce retrieved the bottle and two glasses. “What are we drinking to?”

“To every fucked-up thing that made us the people we are today,” Clint said. “Make mine a double.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Bruce agreed. “And we should have one for Tony, too, because I know he would too.”

“Natasha wouldn’t. They did… bad things to her. I mean…”

“I know. I’ve seen her file. I can’t believe they did that to children…”

“She was never a child. They took that away. Along with everything else. At least I know who I am… she doesn’t even know what parts of her are real and what parts they created. So that’s why I said we should drink to the things that made us who we are, even if they’re fucked up… at least we know who we are.”

“Cheers,” Bruce said, raising his glass. “To surviving.”

“In spite of them,” Clint added, and tipped back his glass.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The team is reunited, but doesn't have much time to relax before recieving word that there's an enemy on the loose. Avengers assemble! Or... sort of assemble in a half-assed, complaining way, if that works better. Whatever.

It took Thor ten minutes from his sudden and unannounced appearance in the middle of movie night to go from standing in front of the TV in full Asgardian armor to marching off to his room dragging a half-asleep and confused Clint by the arm. It took three days for Clint to stop grinning about him being back; it took a week for him to stop sulking about the others constantly making fun of him for it.

 

It didn’t take Bruce and Tony much time at all to recover from the absence of Clint in bed with them at night (or at any other random point during the day). Of course, since it was usually Clint who protested against fucking in the lab, citing the distinct possibility of some kind of toxic chemical or sharp metal thing or robotic arm accidentally becoming involved, his absence just meant that the lab doors were locked a lot more often. Tony sulked mildly that Thor had so cheerfully stolen Clint from them just when they were learning how to get him to play nicely, but Bruce reminded him that Thor would eventually hand Clint over to them as a form of punishment when he wasn’t behaving (which usually meant he was bored; all of them were learning that bored Clint was irritably sarcastic at best and borderline dangerous at worst, and it didn’t take long for Clint to get bored). 

 

It took 24 hours of observation for Natasha to report to Fury that Thor was definitely actually Thor and was not Loki or anyone else pretending to be Thor. Clint signed off on the report as well, since he was certainly in a position to notice if the demigod’s behavior had been unusual. 

 

When Fury’s call hit all of their phones in the early hours of the morning, Tony was dozing on a cot in the lab, and when one of the robots helpfully retrieved his phone from where he’d thrown it when it started ringing, he directed some vulgarities at the robot, the phone, and life in general before tossing it across the room again and going back to sleep. Bruce was still sound asleep in his bed, unaware that Tony had decided to amuse himself by stealing Bruce’s phone the night before and hiding it in the drawer with the sex toys (and, appropriately, setting it to “vibrate”). Thor, who was wide awake and searching the kitchen for something to eat, made a few futile jabs at the touchscreen in an effort to answer the call, then shrugged and went back to his foraging. Clint, who was sprawled out in Thor’s bed trying to convince his sore muscles to respond to his commands, took one look at the phone’s caller I.D. and flipped it onto the floor before pulling the pillow over his head. Steve answered his phone, but couldn’t seem to hear anything, which was probably because Tony had disabled the speaker as a joke. That left Natasha to receive the call, to Fury’s tremendous annoyance. 

“What the fuck is the point of a team of superheroes who can’t even answer their damn phones?”

“We’re kind of a special team,” she said. 

“Well, I want all of your special asses out there in full uniform to the coordinates I sent you, and I want you there in ten minutes!”

“Why? What have we got?”

“Someone apparently decided they were going to play Tony Stark and there’s a big, ugly robot about ten feet tall and firing explosive rounds marching down the middle of the street. Preliminary scan indicates it’s being remotely operated. As far as we know, it’s not capable of flight…”

“Shit. Clint and I can take care of that by ourselves.”

“Get the fucking team out there, Agent Romanov. ASAP.”

 

Once awake enough to understand the situation, Tony was more than happy to bring out the suit again. Bruce was not tremendously happy to bring out the Hulk again, and Natasha reassured him that if this thing was as amateur as it sounded, he wouldn’t have to. Clint just went off looking for his arrows and muttering about it being Thor’s fault if he couldn’t shoot straight, while Thor grabbed his hammer and grinned like a child going on a field trip. Steve, of course, just pulled on his Captain America outfit, picked up his shield, and gave a brisk nod. 

“Let’s go.”

 

With Clint deposited on a strategically located balcony down the street from the reported menace where he could keep an eye on its behavior, Tony zipped off to find the others. 

“Did you say Fury said someone had been playing Tony Stark?” he demanded, through the comm link. “Even being held hostage in a fucking cave I didn’t build anything that ugly.”

“It looks like one of those fighting robots… remember, from that game where you pull the knobs and make the robots punch each other till one’s head pops off?”

“Focus, please, Clint,” Natasha interrupted. “It’s blown up a couple of cars already, and it seems to think it’s going somewhere…”

Thor hit the ground in front of the lurking hulk of roughly welded metal and grinned up at it, spinning his hammer. 

“I’ve fought the likes of you before.”

The thing lobbed an explosive round at him, hitting him squarely in the chest. For a moment, the smoke and dust obscured everyone’s view, and the comm link was full of voices anxiously demanding a response until Thor’s voice chimed in. 

“Well, it appears to want to play! Shall we teach it how we play?”

“You’re not supposed to let things shoot you at point blank range, you fucking idiot,” Clint snapped. 

“I’m sorry. Did I worry you, little Hawk?”

“Goddamn it, if you fucking call me that over a comm link again…”

“Awwww…” Tony crooned. “It’s so cute when you’re protective.”

“As soon as you’re out of that suit, I’m going to put an arrow right in your ass cheek.”

“Guys…” Steve said wearily. “Focus? Natasha, where are you?”

“Down behind the yellow van. Does anything about this seem weird to you guys?”

“Clint bitching, Steve being pissed off at me… sounds normal,” Tony said. 

“No, asshole,” Clint snapped. “Pay attention. There’s something weird going on here.”

“I’m with you on that,” Steve agreed. “First of all, this thing doesn’t seem to have any actual intention of doing anything at the moment other than getting our attention…”

“And it fired a round at Thor, who’s immortal, but it hasn’t fired one at Tony, who isn’t and has been hovering in front of its face for about a minute and a half now,” Clint pointed out. 

Natasha muttered a few curses in Russian. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

“That Fury had some idiots at S.H.I.E.L.D. throw this piece of shit together and sent it out here to drag us out? Like a fucking fire drill or something?” Clint said. 

“Fury wouldn’t destroy property and endanger lives just to… would he?” Steve asked. 

“Umm, that’s an affirmative…” Tony broke in. “JARVIS just hacked me into a couple of building security cameras. See those cars it blew up? Oddly enough, all of them were parked here at exactly 3:00AM this morning, and even more oddly, all of them had tracking devices planted in them. And as a coincidence, someone came along a few minutes later and relocated all of the other cars that were parked near those ones.”

“So it’s not even blowing up anything except the cars that are designated targets?” Bruce said. “Horseshit. I’m glad I didn’t let the Other Guy out for this crap.”

“Fuck all that,” Clint said. “Tony, come get me down from here. I vote we get breakfast somewhere on the way home.”

“We’re just going to leave that thing here?” Steve said, agitated. “It could hurt someone!”

“It’s not going to hurt anything that Fury’s people didn’t slap a tracking device on the back of,” Natasha said. “He’s going to be really, really pissed if we blow this off.”

“What’s he going to do, fire you?” Tony asked. “I pay better than S.H.I.E.L.D. anyway. Let’s get out of here. Clint’s right… I’m hungry.”

“I want a bagel,” Natasha said. “From that one place.”

“Are you guys serious?” Steve demanded. 

“Come on, Cap,” Clint said. “If Fury wanted to test us, he could have tried a little harder.”

Steve sighed. “Yeah, but we have a duty…”

“Our duty does not include dealing with sorry-ass attempts by lazy S.H.I.E.L.D. techs to put together something that doesn’t even vaguely behave like a genuine threat,” Tony said, pointing at the machine, which was currently standing in the middle of the street, having run out of marked cars and seeming somewhat bewildered. “If Fury wants us to put our asses on the line, he’s gonna have to try a lot harder.”

“Bagels sound good,” Bruce said. “After you get Clint down can I have a ride?”

“You can walk like the rest of us,” Natasha said. “No sex partner perks in combat.”

“I was pretty sure if we were talking about getting bagels, we weren’t in combat anymore.”

“Who said no sex partner perks in combat?” Clint protested. 

“It’s not my fault your ass is sore,” she shot back. “Come on, guys. That place runs out of fresh bagels early on weekends.”

“Fuck you. And your bagels,” Clint muttered. 

“You want to fuck a bagel, talk to somebody else,” she said. “And can we turn off the comm link now, please? This is getting a little ridiculous.”

“Getting ridiculous?” Tony asked. “At what point was this not ridiculous?”

“It was actually fairly reasonable until Clint started talking about breakfast…” Bruce started to say, but Natasha deactivated the comm line and headed off in the direction of the bagel shop. The others followed her, leaving their opponent standing in the street while onlookers emerged from the buildings to gawk at the motionless menace. 

“Hey!” someone shouted. “Aren’t you guys the Avengers? Aren’t you going to do something about that thing?”

“Already did!” Tony announced, through the suit’s speakers. “No worries. Some nice people in dark nondescript suits will be showing up to remove it shortly.”

 

Natasha glanced down at her phone, already knowing who was calling. 

“Don’t answer that,” Clint said, falling into step beside her. 

“He’s going to be royally pissed.”

Clint shrugged. “That’s what he gets for not bringing his A-game. Besides… bagels.”

“Don’t get that horrible garlic chive cream cheese. You could use your breath as a lethal weapon after you eat that. You do realize that if Fury was using this as a test to see if you were combat-ready, you probably failed it.”

Bruce looked over his shoulder. “If he was testing to see if Clint was ready to fight, maybe. But I don’t think there’s ever been any doubt that Clint was ready to fight. I think the only doubt was whether he’s recovered enough to know what he’s fighting and why he’s fighting. And if that’s what they were testing, I think he passed.”

“You think Fury made us jump through all those stupid hoops just to see if Clint could accurately differentiate a real threat from a fake one?” Tony asked, swinging the briefcase that the suit had retracted into. 

“That would explain why he let them send such a crappy enemy for us to deal with,” Natasha said. “If the concern was whether Clint’s recovered enough to intelligently assess a situation, and Fury thought he might not be, he wouldn’t send something that could cause a lot of collateral damage if Clint DIDN’T assess the situation correctly or if he responded inappropriately.”

“Did I respond appropriately?” Clint asked. 

“You were just as quick as I was to pick up on the fact that something was off. And you were just as quick as anyone else to assess the level of threat that was actually present. If you’d gone off the handle and attacked that thing, you could have possibly hurt bystanders or damaged something.”

“So Fury called us all out here to fight something just to see if Clint would NOT attack it?” Bruce asked. “Seriously? I was sleeping. Shit.”

“Well, at least now you get bagels,” Tony said helpfully. “At least, you do if you get there before Thor does. So walk faster.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am actively and happily taking suggestions for anything any of you would like to see happen in this story... I can't promise I'll use them, but I would love to hear them and I'll try to work them in if they fit! I wouldn't even still be writing this if it wasn't for fabulous and wonderful readers, so I'd love to know what you'd like to read about.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tony has "Tony should be the best at everything including sex" issues, Clint and Thor's "about damn time you got back" sex is interrupted by Clint's uncooperative brain, and Natasha receives information that puts the whole "crappy attempt at an attack robot" thing into an alarming new light.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had a couple of requests from lovely readers that I wanted to be able to fill for them, but that did require a little bit of a flashback to the day Thor showed back up from Asgard... so don't let that throw you. 
> 
> You didn't think Fury's half-assed "bad guy" from last chapter was really what they thought it was, did you? Hehehehe...

Clint strolled out of the lab with his new arrows that Tony had designed, holding them like a little boy would hold the hand of someone he was sure had cooties. Tony scowled and crossed his arms.

“I made those exactly to his specs. Which are stupid anyway. Why…”

“He’s been making his own arrows since he was, like, seven,” Natasha said, looking up from inspecting the new silencers for her pistols. “You really think he’s going to trust someone else to do it?”

“I know what I’m doing.”

“Do you let Bruce work on the suit?”

Bruce chuckled. Tony rolled his eyes.

“He helps with development and stuff.”

“But you don’t let anybody work on the actual suit except you.”

“Maybe.”

“Well, that’s why Clint makes his own arrows.”

“You don’t seem to mind using my stuff,” Tony said, watching her slide the pistol he didn’t know she had out of her ankle holster and examine the silencer to see if it would fit properly.

“I use whatever I have,” she said. “And since making your own guns is a little tricky and requires some special tools…”

“Tony’s just pissed off because Clint’s been all laid-back since Thor showed back up,” Bruce said.

Tony glared at him. “That has nothing to do with anything.”

Natasha laughed and slid her pistol back into its holster. “Of course not. I don’t know why you’re so pissy about it, anyway… it’s not like you’re not getting laid. And honestly, it’s not very considerate to sit here and act like Bruce isn’t doing the job…”

Bruce shrugged. “He’s Tony. I’m used to it.”

“This wouldn’t have to do with your ‘I’m Tony Stark and I have to be the best at EVERYTHING’ complex, would it?” Natasha asked.

“No,” Tony snapped. “But if it DID… he’s a god and that’s cheating.”

“Thor isn’t pulling out any god-like superpowers to do what he does to Clint,” Natasha said.

“Then why can’t we do it?”

“Because… he’s Clint. And to really, totally let go, he either has to trust someone completely, which is just about impossible for him, or he has to be so far gone that he doesn’t care what happens to him anymore, which is usually really dangerous.”

“But you used to…” Bruce said, raising his eyebrows.

She sighed. “It was a little bit of both with us. He trusts me with his life, and I trust him with mine, but I can’t… Clint doesn’t really have any concept of what it means to feel safe. I couldn’t give him that. I can’t protect him from the world and he knows it, any more than he can protect me. So the trust is there, but not… not the willingness to just hand it all over, let it all go, have no fear. He’s never had a life that didn’t have fear in it.”

“Neither have you,” Bruce said.

She smiled ruefully. “Yeah. Well… I might have, once. I don’t remember. When the Red Room took me, everything I was before that got wiped. Before that, I might have been an ordinary little girl. But I’ll never know. And I’m not looking for someone to make me feel safe.”

“Why would you not feel safe with Iron Man and the Hulk to protect you?” Tony demanded.

Natasha rolled her eyes. “It’s not that kind of safe, Tony.”

“So what does Thor have that Bruce and I don’t have?”

She shook her head. “You don’t want me to answer that.”

“Yeah, I do.”

“What does he have that Bruce doesn’t have? He has the kind of personality that takes over an entire room and he has basically zero self-consciousness.”

“Fair enough,” Bruce said. “You meant Tony wouldn’t like your answer, though.”

“That’s because what Thor has that Tony doesn’t have is maturity,” she said.

Tony crossed his arms. “That’s fucking ridiculous.”

“Yes, and that’s such a mature response,” she shot back.

“I’m mature. And Thor’s a big blond idiot with a hammer. He eats everything, including things that aren’t even food, and he laughs at fart jokes…”

“And that,” Natasha said, shaking her head, “is why ‘mature’ is not the word of choice that people use to describe you, Tony.”

“Help me out here, Bruce,” Tony said.

Bruce shrugged. “Sorry. You’ve got redeeming qualities, Tony, but you’ve got the emotional maturity of a nine-year-old and I don’t know why you’re even bothering to deny it.”

Tony glared at them both. “What, so Thor just pretends to be a big idiot but he’s really all smart and dignified and mature, right?”

“Thor is smart enough to know how to make sure everyone underestimates him,” Natasha said. “Including Loki. And, obviously, including you.”

“So what? Just because of that, he shows back up from Asgard one day and Clint just lets him drag him off without even…”

“What, arguing and bitching like he usually does?” Natasha asked.

“Yeah. That.”

“That’s how he handles human interactions,” she said. “It’s his shield. When you use a two-handed weapon, you don’t get to carry a shield… so he has to use his attitude.”

“So why doesn’t Thor get the bitching?”

“He probably does, occasionally. But, like I said… trust. When you finally find a place where you feel safe, you get to put your shield down for a little while.”

“And we can’t make him feel safe?” Tony asked.

“I can’t even do that, and he’s perfectly willing to literally put his life in my hands. But that’s not the same thing. Look, if Clint didn’t like you, he wouldn’t let you guys near him, much less be willing to do all the things he does with you. If you’re just mad because Thor popped back up out of nowhere and didn’t have to say two words to have Clint follow him off to bed…”

“Maybe a little,” Tony said.

“That part might have something to do with him being a demigod,” she admitted.

“Knew it,” Tony muttered. “Cheating.”

 

 

When Thor had suddenly appeared in the middle of the living room on the day of his return, Clint had been nearly asleep, his legs stretched across Bruce’s thighs and his head tucked against Natasha’s side. In the dim light, standing in front of the light from the TV screen, Thor hadn’t quite seemed real, and Clint had been laying there staring at him blankly for several long moments before Tony made a comment about Asgardians knowing how to make an appearance, and Steve said something polite about it being good to have him back, as if he’d walked in the front door and not abruptly materialized in the living room in the middle of “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” (which was definitely the best one, Clint had insisted, despite Natasha’s preference for “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and Tony muttering that Harrison Ford was overrated and Bruce laughing at him for being jealous of any actor who was taller than him).

Thor cheerfully accepted the greetings, and Tony ordered JARVIS to raise the lights, which reflected off the armor that gleamed across Thor’s arms and chest, the same battle armor he’d been wearing when he and Loki had left for Asgard, except without the dents and charred patches. He took off his helmet, dusted it absently with one hand, and set it down on the coffee table among the beer bottles and empty plates.

“I see I have missed supper.”

“I’m sure there’s something in the fridge,” Tony said. “After all, if you’re not here, we’re minus one non-human massive eating machine…”

Thor ignored him, his eyes falling on Clint, who was still staring at him blankly.

“Did I wake you, little Hawk?”

Clint nodded and propped himself up on one elbow, rubbing his face. “Yeah. It’s… fine. You’re here… like, actually here?”

Thor laughed.

“Of course.”

“Clint, are you having issues?” Natasha asked, glancing down at him.

“When does Clint not have issues?” Tony asked.

Thor smiled and extended his hand. “Would you like to come with me, little Hawk? I wish to go and settle back into my room, and I thought you might wish to join me.”

“You’ve been gone for, like, a month,” Clint said, sitting up.

“I’m aware of that,” Thor said, his smile fading. “It is not easy, traveling between worlds… especially when one’s family would very much prefer that one remain in Asgard and cease what they consider foolish meddling with this realm.”

“But you came back anyway.”

“Of course. I promised I would.”

“Oh.”

Thor frowned. “If it would please you more, I’ll join you for the rest of movie night. I do believe I recognize this man on the screen… but in the other film he was younger and was piloting a ship that flew through space, and had a tall companion with an excess of body hair…”

“When did we show him “Star Wars”?” Bruce asked.

“I thought he was talking about…” Tony started.

“Don’t,” Natasha said.

“But this one was actually pretty good!”

“No. It wasn’t,” she said.

“Either way, this armor must go,” Thor said. “I’ve found that I much prefer my standard Midgard attire to this cumbersome material…”

It might have been cumbersome, Clint’s brain managed to register, but it looked really, really good. And the idea of it coming off looked even better. He let Thor haul him to his feet, wondering when he’d started sleeping so deeply that he didn’t wake ready to fight like he used to, and allowed himself to be escorted off toward Thor’s room.

“Nice of you to spend some time with the rest of us, too!” Tony called.

“Like you’d be hanging out here with us watching movies if you hadn’t been laid in a month and Bruce just walked back in,” Natasha said.

“What, we don’t count as getting laid?” Bruce asked, not managing to sound nearly as offended as Tony clearly was.

“So the guy’s a demigod. Fuck. Last time I checked he wasn’t the God of Sex or anything like that…”

Thor chuckled and wrapped an arm around Clint’s shoulder.

“It’s good to see that nothing has changed.”

Something in Clint’s gut, though, was telling him that something had indeed changed, something he wasn’t at all comfortable with, something that was crawling under his skin and nagging at the back of his mind. Thor studied him for a moment.

“What is it?”

“Nothing.”

“It isn’t nothing, little Hawk. But we need not speak of it now if you don’t wish to.”

 

 

Getting the armor off was enough of a task to occupy both of them for several minutes, as it had an excessive number of odd fastenings and belts that seemed to serve very little purpose.

“Pain in the ass…” Clint muttered. “What the hell is all this for?”

Thor laughed and tossed his chest plate aside with a metallic clang. “Your battle attire isn’t much better. Your pants have buckles on them that don’t even attach to anything.”

“Yeah, well… I think maybe some of the equipment designers at S.H.I.E.L.D. have kind of dirty minds…”

“They must, to make your suit fit so tightly over your buttocks. Of course, I’m very pleased that they did, and so is everyone else who has the opportunity to walk behind you…"

“Fuck. Shut up.”

Thor stripped off the last of his armor, leaving only the plain undergarments he wore under it, and he turned his attention to tugging off Clint’s shirt before settling himself down on the bed, motioning for Clint to join him.

He couldn’t miss the moment of hesitation, though.

“Clint… friend. Why are you troubled?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted.

“Do you want…”

Clint shook his head, trying to drive the nagging thoughts away, and his hands found Thor’s strong shoulders, and Thor’s mouth found his, and there was a month of demand and eagerness and heat and desire in that kiss, and for the moment it was more than enough to burn everything else away.

Only for a moment, though, and then the unsettling feeling was back, creeping into his stomach. He tried to shove it away, tried to concentrate on the feeling of the muscular body pressed against his own, the weight pushing him down into the mattress, the big hands wrapping around his wrists to hold them above his head. And this wasn’t anything new or strange; Clint liked to be held down and Thor knew it (and so did the rest of the team, at this point), but today it just increased his tension. He turned his head away, feeling the heat of an eager tongue against his throat.

“Do you want the collar?” Thor murmured.

Clint’s mind jumped in two opposite directions, the alert-to-danger part of him screaming at him to remain alert, to fight whatever danger his subconscious was already aware of. Another part, though, the part that told him he was not in danger, that this was perhaps the safest place he would ever be in his entire life, pushed the thought to the front that if he wanted to know what felt so wrong, going under would silence his defenses and let Thor fix this for him.

“Yeah,” he said quietly.

Thor studied him for a moment, but then his hand reached out and found the smooth, familiar strip of leather on the nightstand. Clint lifted his head to let it slide behind his neck, felt the coolness of the buckle against his throat, and felt his mind start to shift and sink and turn sideways as his awareness of the collar seemed to take over his entire body, his entire consciousness. His eyes drifted closed.

“I thought of you often while I was gone,” Thor said.

Clint’s mouth opened and words came out of it that he hadn’t intended. “I thought about you…”

A slight chuckle. “Did you? I thought perhaps you were sufficiently entertained with Bruce and Tony. Natasha assured me they would attend to you if you needed help relaxing…”

“It’s not the same,” he muttered.

Thor’s voice remained easy, but Clint could sense the intent awareness and the sharp focus of those blue eyes on his face.

“Why is it not the same, little Hawk?”

He couldn’t put words together to answer that, but he felt his body responding to Thor’s bare skin against it, and he shifted, pressing himself up against him. Thor inhaled sharply and tightened his grip on Clint’s wrists.

“I wish you would tell me what troubles you, but I… it seems like it’s been a very long time, though it shouldn’t… in Asgard such time is barely the blink of an eye…”

“Well, it seemed like a pretty long time here,” Clint said, arching up to bring their bodies together.

Thor gritted his teeth. “I want you.”

“You can have me.”

Thor shifted his grip to hold both Clint’s wrists with one large hand while the other reached for the dresser again, and then there were soft leather cuffs instead, securing his hands to the bars at the head of the bed. He pulled and squirmed against them, trying to settle in and let the familiar feeling take him deeper under, but instead he felt the anxiety forcing its way up through the haze, demanding his attention. He bit it back, tried to relax. He felt Thor sit back on his knees and his hands pressing gently against Clint’s thighs, and in spite of himself his muscles tensed and he realized he was pushing back against Thor’s hands. This was far from being a signal that would warn Thor of something wrong, though; it certainly wasn’t unlike Clint to resist and fight a little, even when he was under. Actually, it was fairly normal. Thor hummed and leaned down and licked a long stripe up the inside of one thigh, coaxing, and Clint clenched his jaw and demanded that his body listen to him and let his legs open, but they refused, and suddenly the hands and the mouth on him and the cuffs and the collar and the voice in the back of his head that wouldn’t go away collided with each other with enough force that Clint swore he could feel the impact rock through his body.

“Stop! Stop it!”

He didn’t realize he’d said it until Thor’s hands were instantly withdrawn from his body, and a heartbeat later the cuffs on his wrists were released, and his hands dug into the sheets and wrapped into tight balls, but he couldn’t open his eyes, couldn’t look at Thor, didn’t want to see the horror and shock and concern on his face when even Clint didn’t know what was wrong. He had never used the safe word Thor had given him; whether Asgardians knew the terminology of “safe word” or not, there was no doubt that’s what it was, and he had used it now, when Thor was barely touching him?

“Clint,” he said anxiously. “I am sorry…”

“I’m fine. It’s okay. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Something is wrong… you are never afraid when you’re with me. Let me take off the collar…”

Clint shook his head. Somehow, this place between being fully under and fully himself felt safer than coming all the way back to reality.

“Then speak to me, little Hawk. Tell me what’s wrong.”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know why you don’t want me to touch you?” Thor asked, and the hurt in his voice slid right under Clint’s skin.

“I’m… something… you came back, and…”

Thor placed a hand on his chest. “You were afraid I wouldn’t come back.”

“I… thought about it. That you might not.”

“And?”

“Natasha and I… when we were apart, we always knew one of us might not come back. One of us could be dead anytime. I wouldn’t know anything… just that she never came back.”

“But if you feared I wouldn’t return, what troubles you now, when I am here?”

Clint let the words fall without letting himself think about them; it was the only way they were going to get out of his head.

“Because with Natasha we just accepted… that there was always a might not come back. With everyone, there was always a might not come back. With my brother. When my parents left. When the circus moved to a new town. I’m used to people that don’t come back. I’m used to knowing they won’t. I’m used to being okay with that. And I thought about you not coming back and I wasn’t okay with that… I couldn’t be okay with that… I needed you to come back and I’m not supposed to need anything and I’m not supposed to need someone and if I need someone like that, I’m going to be sorry, and they’re going to leave, and it’s going to hurt because I let myself think they might stay…”

Thor stroked his hair. “But I will stay.”

“No one stays.”

“No one until now, little Hawk. But you have something different now. You have all of us… our team. Our family. And one of us may fall in battle, but none of us, Clint, will leave you without a fight.”

Clint let out the breath he’d been holding. “I can’t… I’m not supposed to need anyone. I’m not supposed to care. That’s not how it’s supposed to work…”

Thor chuckled. “Yes, little Hawk. That IS how it’s supposed to work. You may not have let yourself be bound to others, but you let yourself be chained by fear.”

“I’ve had enough loss.”

“There is always loss. There is always love again. Natasha knows this. That’s why she lets herself love you… because loving someone gives us something that we can’t have if our hearts are closed.”

The special agent part of Clint’s brain, the wary teenager under the big top with a bow and arrows, the tired child who didn’t even have the energy to look for another place to hide from another beating, told him to back away, get up, walk out, wipe all of this away, pack his things, get out of the tower, get out of the city.

He ignored it, and rolled over and buried his face against Thor’s chest and let himself be wrapped up in immensely strong arms and held tightly.

“Why can’t anything just be easy?” he muttered.

Thor smiled. “If it was easy, you would not be Clint. As Bruce always says about Tony… it comes with the territory.”

“Question is why anyone wants to bother with either of us,” Clint said, pressing his forehead against Thor’s shoulder and feeling the tension and the edginess and the fear flow out of him.

“Because those who have the deepest hearts guard them the most ferociously, little Hawk, especially when they have been hurt before and do not wish to be hurt again.”

  
“I’ve had about enough hurt.”

Thor rubbed a hand over his neck.

“I cannot promise that the future will unfold as I wish it to, my friend, but I swear to you that as long as it is within my power to control, I will never hurt you.”

“I know,” Clint murmured, sinking into the touch, and this time when Thor pulled him closer and kissed him, his mind and body were finally in complete agreement.

 

 

“Agent Romanov.”

Natasha tucked her phone against her shoulder and glanced at Bruce and Tony, who had returned their attention to one of their projects and took no notice of her as she stepped off into a quiet corner of the lab.

“Who is this?”

“Don’t worry about that.”

“The only people who have this number are Fury and the rest of my team.”

“Well, if Fury knows it, you can pretty much assume I know it too.”

Natasha smiled to herself. “Agent Hill. You’re calling from a civilian line, so either this isn’t S.H.I.E.L.D. business, or it is their business and you don’t want them to know you’re talking about it.”

“Look, I know you all think you figured out what that drill the other day was about…”

“I was disappointed. Fury could have done much better.”

“Well, you know how much Fury likes taking orders.”

Natasha’s skin prickled. “Are you saying that came from someone above Fury? Are they that worried about Clint still being compromised…”

“They’re not testing Clint,” she said.

“Who are they testing?”

“There’s someone else they think has been compromised.”

Natasha muttered a few Russian curses under her breath. “Who?”

“Why do you think I’m calling you, Agent Romanov?”

The line went dead.

Natasha felt her stomach twist, felt fear rise in her throat, forced it down, and walked back into the bright lights of the lab to talk to Tony about maybe a few security updates that needed to be made to the communication systems.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The team starts to wonder why Natasha is keeping her distance. JARVIS knows a lot about a lot of things, when someone actually bothers to listen to him for a change.

“So, are you ever going to feel like telling us what’s going on with Natasha?” Tony asked, as Clint flopped down on the couch between him and Thor. 

Clint frowned. “I thought she was just avoiding me. She does that sometimes. Usually when I pissed her off and don’t know what I did.”

“I thought she was just avoiding me, because she hates me in general,” Tony said, glancing over at Steve, who was sitting in one of the armchairs with a book in his lap. “What about you, stud? How much have you seen of her over the past week?”

Steve glanced up and gave Tony the raised-eyebrow look that meant his question had been deemed too inappropriate for any other response. 

“Let’s try this,” Bruce said. “Steve, have you seen Natasha around much this last week or so?”

Steve gave him a polite nod. “No. I haven’t. Like Clint said… when she decides she doesn’t want to be around you, you don’t always know why, and you sort of… well, learn not to ask.”

“It is rather concerning that she would avoid all of us,” Thor said. “I have seen her a few times in the halls at night but she hasn’t spoken to me. I assumed perhaps she was displeased with me…”

“Well, either we ALL pissed her off at the same time, or there’s something else going on,” Tony said. “Clint... if there was something wrong, would she tell you?”

“Honestly… probably not.”

“So what if she’s in some kind of trouble and we don’t know about it?”

“Perhaps there’s a reason she doesn’t want us to know about it,” Thor suggested. 

Tony crossed his arms. “So we’re just supposed to sit around and let one of our team members possibly have something bad going on and we’re not supposed to help them?”

“She hasn’t asked for help, Tony,” Steve said. 

“She wouldn’t ask for it even if she needed it,” Clint said. “That’s how she is.”

“Hmmm. We don’t know anyone else like that,” Bruce muttered. 

“It’s how we’re trained,” Clint said. “If you’re in trouble, you don’t ask for help. And the deeper in trouble you are, the more important it is that you don’t. Because if you’re in trouble, the person you ask for help might end up being the person you should be running from…”

“Yeah, but she’s not in trouble with us,” Tony said. “Why would she need to hide from us?”

Clint glanced over his shoulder, a habit he never seemed to lose no matter how many times there was no one behind him. 

“Natasha has secrets. I don’t know them all. Fury doesn’t know them all. She’s got… things. From before. That she doesn’t want anyone to know about, ever.”

“Well, if those things decide to come for her, they’re going to have to go through us,” Tony declared. 

“You’ll never see them coming,” Clint said, shaking his head. “If she’s staying away from all of us… maybe there’s something happening that she wants to make sure none of us end up involved in.”

“And the fact that we’d be more than willing to get involved to help her isn’t really part of the way she handles things, is it,” Bruce sighed. 

Clint laughed bitterly. “What do you think?”

 

 

Natasha sat on her bed, legs crossed, staring at the same page of the same book that she’d been staring at for the past hour. She’d forgotten what book it was, so she closed it and pushed it aside. 

“JARVIS, what is the team doing?”

“They are discussing you, Agent Romanov. Specifically, why you have been isolating yourself from the team and whether you are in danger.”

She shook her head. “It’s none of their business.”

“They seem to feel rather strongly that it is, ma’am.”

“You know, don’t you.”

She could almost hear JARVIS calculating an appropriate response. “If you are referring to the phone call that you received a week ago from Agent Hill, I do monitor all calls received on the team communication lines, although I do not monitor private calls.”

“So you know what she said. About them thinking I’ve been compromised.”

“I don’t believe I fully understand the nuances of the term,” JARVIS said. “I am assuming that it is being used in the sense in which it is defined as ‘to become vulnerable or fail to function properly’, but I have seen no indication of you failing to function according to your normal parameters.”

“They’re not worried about me being vulnerable,” she explained. “They’re worried about me being a vulnerability. A weakness. Someone who’s potentially going to act against their interests or make them vulnerable.”

“I see no reason why you would do that, Agent Romanov.”

“No, but apparently Fury does,” she said, lowering her head. “I thought he trusted me.”

“Agent Romanov, forgive me if I am making assumptions that are not entirely confirmed by data analysis, but… it was Agent Hill who spoke to you. Am I correct?”

“Yes.”

“And Agent Hill, according to all information I can obtain, is greatly trusted by Director Fury and is very loyal to him. Is that correct?”

“Yes,” she said again, biting her lip. “You’re saying that if Fury actually thought I was compromised, Hill would know that too. And she wouldn’t have gone behind Fury’s back to call me.”

“That seems to be the logical deduction, if human behavior can ever be considered entirely logical.”

She flopped back onto her bed, staring at the ceiling. Apparently she hadn’t even been managing to think logically. Maria Hill was fiercely loyal to Fury and to S.H.I.E.L.D., and she didn’t owe Natasha anything. The only reason she would have called would be if Fury had wanted Natasha to know about it, but hadn’t been able to take the risk of letting her know himself. 

“If I may make a suggestion, Agent Romanov?”

She sighed. “Is this about talking to the team?”

“I merely wished to point out that Director Fury selected this team, for reasons that I must admit are known only to him and seem to defy all logic and reason. He selected you to be a part of it, despite your value as an individual agent. Therefore, he must be of the opinion that you provide the team with an important…”

“I know, I know. But that doesn’t mean they need to know my business.”

“That is true, Agent Romanov. But have you considered the possibility that Director Fury has kept you here with the team, rather than sending you out on individual missions for which you would undoubtedly have been a valuable asset, because he intends that the team be available to protect you if you should be in danger?”

“Bullshit,” she muttered. 

“I am simply reporting the possibilities that are apparent when all available information is processed…”

“If someone’s coming after me and it’s someone bigger than Fury, I’m not putting the rest of the team in the line of fire by telling them about it.”

“My analysis of the situation, Agent Romanov, indicates that if you are correct and there are parties with greater authority than Director Fury pursuing action against you, there is a high likelihood that the rest of the team is already in the line of fire, as you say, and that it is very possible you are being targeted as a tool to gain access to the entire team.”

She sat up and glared at the speaker on the wall. 

“Fuck you, JARVIS.”

“I’m afraid I lack the necessary…”

“Did they put you up to this? The guys?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Really. Nobody asked you to give me a message?”

“Actually, they did.”

She rolled her eyes. “I knew it. Fine. What’s the message?”

“Agent Barton wishes you to know that he is going to eat all of your peanut butter protein bars specifically for the purpose of irritating you if you do not join them for dinner this evening.”

“That’s the best they can come up with?”

“I removed the inappropriate language and needless references to sexual activities, but yes, that seems to be the best they can come up with.”

Natasha shook her head and swung her feet to the floor. 

“So… why did Tony program an AI that never swears or says anything disgusting or vulgar when that’s pretty much all he ever does?”

“Because Ms. Potts threatened to stop working here if she did not have the opportunity to speak to at least one person at work each day who was not disrespectful, tactless, inappropriate, or bad-tempered. I am not technically a person, but apparently it was a satisfactory compromise. I continue to work with Ms. Potts regularly, as she is still the CEO of Stark Industries, and she continues to insist that Mr. Stark maintain my programming requirements for appropriate language and behavior.”

“I really don’t even know how to go out there and talk to the team about this, you know.”

“It may be difficult, but I believe you will find that they are more than willing to help you in any way they can.”

“Yeah, that’s sort of what I’m afraid of.”

“In that case, perhaps you should consider that it is the only way to prevent the malicious consumption of your peanut butter protein bars.”

She glanced at the speaker. “Are you making a joke?”

“I do not joke, Agent Romanov.”

“Fine. I’ll go. But if Clint’s touched my protein bars I’ll kick his ass. He doesn’t even fucking like peanut butter.”

 

 

Tony was asleep with his head on Clint’s shoulder when Natasha stepped silently into the living room. Clint glanced at her and raised his eyebrows, and Thor gave her a nod of greeting, but neither of them said anything. 

“Where did Steve and Bruce go?” she asked. 

“They’re making spaghetti,” Clint said, his voice low to keep Tony asleep. 

“What are you watching? Is that a talking starfish? And why is that crab…”

“It’s Spongebob Squarepants,” Clint explained. “Thor thinks it’s the funniest fucking thing he’s ever seen.”

Thor gave him a sideways glance. “I believe you are the one who put it on.”

“Yeah, well… you know.”

Tony yawned and raised his head. He spotted Natasha standing in the doorway and opened his mouth to say something, but Clint elbowed him, and he didn’t. 

“I wasn’t really going to eat your protein bars,” Clint said absently. 

“I know. You hate peanut butter.”

“How can anyone hate peanut butter?” Tony asked, frowning. “I mean, that’s like hating... I don’t know… sex, or something.”

“Peanut butter is as good as sex?” Bruce said, looking in from the kitchen. “Shit… I like peanut butter, but I don’t like it THAT much.”

“That’s not what I said…”

“No, but it’s what we’ve all decided you said, so now we’re going to relentlessly harass you about it,” Clint noted. 

“You can all fuck off,” Tony said, laying his head back down on Clint’s shoulder. “I was better off asleep.”

Clint shrugged him off. “Gonna have to find another pillow. Thor makes a pretty good one.”

Tony scowled and grabbed an armful of cushions from the other end of the couch. 

“I’ll bet he does,” he muttered. 

Thor raised an eyebrow. “I can hear you, you know.”

“Yeah. If you look my name up, you won’t find ‘subtlety’ in the description.”

“If you want to quit being pissy and jealous for a few minutes, you could come and make the salad,” Bruce suggested. “And before you even say anything crude about tossing salads, Steve’s doing most of the cooking, so you should probably behave.”

“Fuck,” Tony grumbled, stretching and sitting up. “All right.”

 

 

Clint waited until Tony had disappeared into the kitchen before he motioned for Natasha to come over. She hesitated, but after a moment she let herself settle into the empty spot between Clint and Thor. 

“I still can’t believe you’re watching this,” she said, eyes fixed on the TV screen.”

“Tasha,” Clint said, his voice unusually gentle. 

“Don’t,” she sighed, even though she wasn’t even sure what she didn’t want him to do.

“Are you in trouble?”

“I don’t know,” she said quietly, keeping her voice even. “Maybe.”

“I’m your partner. Thor’s your friend.”

“Yeah, and the kind of trouble I’m in, talking to either of you might make it worse.”

Clint’s eyes narrowed. “Someone thinks you’ve been compromised.”

Her silence answered him. 

“Who would think such a thing?” Thor demanded. “I will speak to Director Fury myself…”

“It’s not Fury,” she said. “It’s… someone above him, I guess.”

“If it’s someone higher than Fury, it’s not about S.H.I.E.L.D.,” Clint said. “The people above him don’t care what individual agents are up to. It’s something political…”

“And I’m a perfect pawn for that game,” she murmured. “Everyone already knows I used to play on the bad guy team. I’ve always been compromised.”

“Whatever this is, we’re not letting it happen,” Clint said firmly. “We don’t have to play this game anymore, Tasha. We’ve got… friends. They can…”

“I don’t want the others to know.”

“They need to know,” Thor said. 

“Why?”

“Because anything that puts you in danger puts us all in danger,” he said. “Even if you would wish it to be otherwise, what happens to you will affect us all. None of us are willing to sit idly while you fight your battles alone.”

She shook her head. “You don’t get it. What if this is what they wanted me to do? What if they wanted me to come and tell all of you, rile up the team, get everyone involved, then bring everyone down? What if that was their plan?”

Clint laughed. “Making a plan assuming that the Black Widow would ask a bunch of idiots like us for help would be like hitting in blackjack when you’ve got twenty-one.”

“And yet that’s exactly what I’m doing,” she sighed. 

Thor smiled and touched her shoulder, feeling her tense, but not jerk away. 

“They expect you to be alone.”

“That’s because I’m always alone.”

“You have a partner,” Clint reminded her, looking slightly offended. 

“And my partner knows perfectly well that I’ve never been able to give him all of me, and I never will be,” she said, glancing at him. “Look… I don’t even know what to tell the other guys. All I got was a tip-off that someone wanted Fury taking a closer look at me, and when they figure out Fury’s not playing their game, they’ll figure out another way to pull me out.”

“And when they do, we’ll be ready,” Clint said.

“You don’t even know what you’re planning to be ready for.”

“Like that ever mattered before?”

“True. Having a plan isn’t really how we do things, is it?”

“Maybe that’s why Fury kept insisting we were going to give Coulson a heart attack.”

She shook her head. “I don’t want to drag everyone into this.”

“It’s way too late for that,” Clint said. “Everybody was dragged in as soon as we realized there was something going on. If you hadn’t told us, we’d just have gone off and done stupid things to try to find out what it was.”

“Isn’t doing stupid things what you usually do?”

“I didn’t say we weren’t gonna do stupid things anyway. I just said we would have. It’s pretty much a guarantee that stupid things are going to get done.”

Tony looked in from the kitchen. “We’re doing stupid things? I’m in. No questions asked.”

From in the kitchen, they could hear Steve’s voice wearily questioning. 

“Is there any possibility we could consider doing not-stupid things?”

“Fuck that,” Tony said. “We’re the Avengers.”


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Natasha is called on to complete a mysterious and probably not-good task, and she's warned not to let her teammates know anything about it. Well, you can probably imagine how well that goes.

The buzzing phone woke Natasha from an uneasy half-sleep and she didn’t even have to look at the clock to know this wasn’t the hour for casual calls. She stared at it for a moment before answering it.

“Agent Romanov.”

The voice wasn’t familiar.

“Who is this? Where did you get this number?”

“We explained to Director Fury that our need to contact you was quite immediate,” the man said, and now she could distinctly pick up the heavy Russian accent. “He is also aware that it is of some importance to him that you cooperate with us.”

“Are you the ones who’ve been…”

“You will not ask questions, Agent. You will report to the following address, and you will do so within one hour. Upon arriving, you will be met by members of my team, who will assist you in carrying out your mission.”

“If Fury gave his approval of this, you’ll know the code,” she said, keeping her voice cool.

“The code is ‘Director Fury does not believe in stupid fucking codes,’ Agent.”

She closed her eyes. So they had talked to Fury. And this was a mission. She felt her mind slipping into that very different mode, vision clearing, senses sharpening, awareness tightening to focus on the task at hand.

“What is my mission?”

“You will find out when you arrive.”

“If you don’t give me some information, I won’t be properly equipped. You want me to do my best work, you let me bring the right tools.”

There was a moment of hushed discussion.

“That is reasonable. Your mission is to enter the building, which is under a moderate level of electronic security but nothing that should be a problem for someone with your skills. Once inside the building, you will gain access to the building’s internal servers and you will be expected to locate and remove certain information.”

“What do I get out of it?” she asked. “If this was S.H.I.E.L.D. business, you wouldn’t be the ones calling me.”

“What do you get out of it? We know quite a lot about you, Agent Romanov. Or would you prefer we use one of your other names? There have been so many. We know many things you do not want your team, your people, to know about. If you do not cooperate with us, we will release that information. To everyone. Including the public.”

She felt the muscles in her neck tighten. So that was how they’d gotten Fury to agree to this; releasing information about her past as a Russian spy and assassin responsible for more violence and ugliness than anyone knew about, especially releasing it to the press along with her identity and past identities, would not only put the entire team in danger, but it would put Fury under the gun for not having her killed like he was supposed to, and even more so for making her an Avenger. And Fury wouldn’t have agreed to put her on the line like this unless they’d been able to prove to him they had some seriously damaging information.

“Fine,” she said. She didn’t have to like her missions; she just had to complete them. “As long as your people know I will be prepared to defend myself if necessary.”

“It shouldn’t be necessary, Agent. We do not want you killed. You are of much more use as a bargaining tool than as a corpse.”

And there it was, she thought to herself. Whoever had warned Fury that she was a liability to S.H.I.E.L.D. and the Avengers had been right. She’d never forgotten her past, and she’d known in her heart it would never forget her either.

“I’ll be there in one hour,” she said. “Give me the address.”

“Before I do, Agent Romanov… I want to make sure one thing is very clear. If any of your Avengers, your friends, should decide to accompany you, my men will have orders to kill them on sight, and they are well equipped to do so. And if you should attempt such a…”

“I won’t,” she said. “If you know me as well as you say you do, you know I work alone.”

“Very good.”

She listened to the address, her eyes roaming around the room, mentally taking stock of her gear and what she would need. When the person on the other end of the phone hung up, she stood and went to her closet, reaching for the black fitted suit hanging in the corner.

“JARVIS,” she said.

“Ma’am?”

“Everything you just heard is absolutely confidential. It is not for anyone else, no matter who asks, no matter who tries to tell you otherwise. Do you understand?”

“Ma’am, I can only do what I am programmed…”

“Then input this into your programming. If I go and do this and get it done, everything will be okay, at least for now. If the guys get in on this, it’s going to be bad.”

“I believe the team is fully capable of handling…”

“Yeah. They probably are. But if this crew, whoever they are, gets the feeling that anything is fishy, they’re going to bail on the mission and they’re going to cause a lot of trouble. I need to play along, at least long enough to find out who they are and how to deal with them.”

“Yes, ma’am,” JARVIS said. “If you are looking for your glass cutter, it is in the bottom dresser drawer.”

“Thanks.”

 

 

From his perch outside his room, high above the street, Clint watched with narrowed eyes as the tiny but familiar figure with the red hair and the steady stride left the building, crossed the street, and disappeared into an alley. Tony was far from being the only insomniac on the team, but while he spent his restless nights in his lab, Clint spent his in one of his nests, watching things. Now he quickly ducked back into his room and swung down the ladder from the loft.

“JARVIS. Where did Natasha go?”

“That information is classified.”

“Fuck you.”

He reached into his closet for his bow and arrows, which he’d persuaded the team he should be allowed to keep in his room if Natasha was allowed to wear concealed firearms to breakfast.

“Agent Barton, would you like me to alert any of the other team members?”

He paused for a moment, considering. Of course he’d go after Natasha. That wasn’t even a question. But he wasn’t sure if taking the entire team with him was a good idea.

“Do you know where she went?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Can Tony force you to tell me?”

“With a bit of effort, probably. Agent Romanov is a talented hacker but Mr. Stark did design this system.”

“Okay. Then wake Tony and Bruce up and get them down to the lab. I may need them to do some stuff for me. And… what are Steve and Thor doing?”

“Captain Rogers is in his room, and Thor is in the kitchen.”

“Is Thor ever NOT in the kitchen?”

“If I may suggest, sir…”

“What?”

“I know that you find Thor’s company more agreeable than that of Captain Rogers, but if what is required in this situation is stealth and subtlety, I must recommend…”

“Yeah. I get your point,” Clint said, trying to imagine any situation in which “Thor” and “subtle” would be used in the same sentence without a “not” between them. “I think this is a solo mission, though. Tell Tony and Bruce to hurry up. I don’t know what Natasha’s into but I need to know, and I don’t think I have a lot of time to waste.”

 

 

Tony, it turned out, wasn’t sleeping either, and he was in the lab and working away before Clint even walked in.

“She was on the phone with someone right before she left,” he said, without looking up from his laptop screen. “Incoming call. Can’t trace it. She’s got some hacks in here to keep JARVIS shut up but I should be able to work around them… just give me a minute.”

“I don’t know if we’ve got a lot of minutes,” Clint said. “I’ve still got to catch up to her before…”

Bruce stumbled in, rubbing his eyes and fussing with the shirt he’d just pulled on.

“What’s going on? Why am I awake at two in the morning?”

“Natasha needs our help,” Clint said.

“For reference, I’m pretty sure she specifically DIDN’T ask us for help,” Tony pointed out.

“Yeah, well…”

Tony interrupted him with a muttered and satisfied curse. “That’s it. Okay. Now, JARVIS, replay Agent Romanov’s last phone conversation.”

“That information is confidential…”

“And I just gave myself access.”

“Dr. Banner and Agent Barton…”

“I’m giving them access too, damnit. Just fucking play the phone conversation.”

 

 

The directions she’d been given sent her scaling the fire escape of one building and making the leap across the gap to a balcony on the next building. The dizzying height didn’t bother her; she knew enough about the human body to know that there would be no chance of surviving a fall even a quarter of that distance, so there wasn’t much point in thinking about the possibility of falling. Peering through the glass doors into the darkened room, she could see a large conference table, high-backed leather chairs, a sleek digital projector mounted discreetly against the ceiling, and a large, blank display screen. Her eyes quickly took in the counter with the high-end coffee maker and the small refrigerator, probably stocked with all sorts of expensive bottled waters. She inspected the door frame, found the security light flashing at the corner of it.

Easy, she thought. Apparently they weren’t expecting a break-in on the 34th floor balcony, if all they had was an easily distracted motion sensor. She quickly disarmed it before letting the glass cutter do its work, opening a hole for her to reach in and unlock the door.

As soon as she stepped inside, the two figures she hadn’t been able to see, but had been expecting, emerged from the shadows against the wall, both with pistols raised and ready, both in dark suits, both with the same unreadable expression.

That was good, though. At least she was dealing with professionals. Professionals didn’t get scared or panicky or upset and shoot someone for no reason. If they killed you, they knew why, and so did you.

“You’re late,” one of the men said.

“I’m never late,” she replied, in Russian.

The man chuckled and answered in the same language. “You’re three minutes early. But we’ll tolerate that. Won’t we?”

The other man nodded.

“I’m here. Show me what I’m supposed to do.”

“We have taken the liberty of dealing with the security cameras in the hallway. This way.”

She let herself be directed out into the darkened hallway, every muscle on the alert. Part of her was contemplating the fact that she was quite certain she could take out both of them and make a quick escape, but that would just piss off whoever was pulling the strings, so she kept her breathing steady and her feet moving forward.

The first man stopped and opened a door. She could hear the humming of computers even before he switched the light on, and wasn’t surprised to see that the room consisted of a few plain-looking desks with silent, shut-down computers and, behind those, several rows of server units, far more than seemed necessary even for a building of this size and with as many offices and computers as it probably had.

“Okay, so I’m guessing this is where the IT guys work. Information technology?”

“Yes.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“You will need to gain access to one of these computers. We have attempted to infiltrate the system from the outside and failed. The information is only accessible from computers within the security network.”

“Want to give me any hints?”

“You’re the famous Agent Romanov,” he said, grinning. “You figure it out.”

She rolled her eyes and sat down at the computer, one gloved finger pressing the button to wake it from its slumber. She reached for the bag she had slung over her shoulder, but both men quickly raised their guns.

“Easy, boys,” she said, holding up her hands. “I need my laptop. It’s got software on it that will help me crack this encryption. Would you be happier if I let you get it out for me?”

One of the men unzipped her bag, pulled out the small laptop, and handed it to her. She was silently thankful that she had not only the authorized S.H.I.E.L.D. encryption-breaking software, but also the unauthorized stuff she’d managed to steal by breaking S.H.I.E.L.D.’s own encryption, and a couple of experimental programs borrowed from Tony’s system without his knowledge.

“There. I’m into the basic desktop,” she said. “Now you have to tell me what I’m looking for.”

The man handed her a slip of paper. “Do you recognize this name?”

She swallowed hard. “Yes.”

“You should. He is responsible for the programming that conditioned you and your fellow agents… that is, before you made the foolish decision to leave us.”

“It was a smart choice. They had more to offer.”

The man shrugged. “It does not matter. There is information about this person stored in the systems in this building… information which has not been released yet. This information needs to be made to disappear before someone leaks it to others.”

“And you have no idea where I might have to look to access that information.”

“That’s your job. And I suggest you do it quickly… the cleaning crews will be arriving within a few hours.”

It didn’t take long for Natasha to realize that this was not your everyday business computer system. Behind the apparently ordinary desktop was a maze of coded, encrypted, and otherwise impossible navigation, leaving her completely bewildered.

“This is ridiculous. I’ll never find anything in here. I don’t even know where to look.”

“You will find it… or there will be unpleasant consequences for you and your Avenger friends.”

Even as she was speaking, she was busy, although she wasn’t going to let the two men know it. Tony’s software ended up coming in handy after all, as he had designed it to use JARVIS’s artificial intelligence programming to search for key words and phrases that might be used in regards to an individual, then detect whatever code name or other device was being used to shield the person’s actual identity. That gave her the files, and her stolen S.H.I.E.L.D. software was working on opening them, but she hadn’t decided whether to let the two men in on this yet.

Abruptly, the screen began to flash, and Natasha resisted the urge to bang her head off the table when she realized it was displaying the AC/DC logo along with the official Stark Industries tagline.

“What the hell is that?” one of the men demanded.

“Fuck if I know. I’m using some software I stole from Stark and maybe it’s…”

“Maybe it’s given JARVIS complete access to this system?”

All three of them spun around, and even Natasha wasn’t sure how Clint had taken advantage of the onscreen distraction to drop perfectly silently out of the ceiling, but there he was, bow drawn back, grinning.

“Hi, Tasha.”

She opened her mouth to tell him they were wearing body armor, that she’d been able to feel it against her shoulder as they rummaged through her bag and leaned over her. But it was too late; Clint’s fingers released and the arrow was across the room and thudding harmlessly off the man’s chest.

The man raised his eyebrows, then laughed as he and his companion raised their guns, making sure to aim for Clint’s head in case he’d taken the same precautions they had. Clint raised his hands, attempting to look startled and alarmed, but Natasha could read him better than that.

“Stupid…” one of the men started to say, but that was as far as he got before all of them, except Clint, were distracted by a strange hissing noise at their feet. Natasha had only a moment to take note of the strange smell and the sting in her throat before she felt herself falling.

She woke to someone pressing something to her face, and she tried to swat it away until she managed to open her eyes and realized that it was Clint, staring down at her over the familiar shape of a S.H.I.E.L.D.-issue gas mask. He was holding one against her nose and mouth, filtering out whatever chemical he had unleashed, and as awareness made its way back into her head, she realized that she should have known Clint would never have used anything truly dangerous knowing she was going to get a face full of it.

“Put this on,” he said, his voice muffled.

She sat up, head spinning, and strapped the mask over her head.

“What the fuck are you doing here?”

“Stuff,” he said cheerfully. “Are you up to helping me tie up these two assholes, or do you need to sit for a minute?”

They made short work of finding an assortment of electrical cords to securely wrap the arms and legs of the unconscious men, making sure they would be found right where they were by whoever showed up to open the building. Clint straightened up and waved at the computer screen.

“You like that?”

“What the hell did you guys do?”

“Tony knew you had his software. He didn’t figure you’d have noticed that it had the potential to give JARVIS direct access to whatever system it’s being used on.”

“Only if I gave him access…”

“Or if Tony tweaked some stuff,” Clint said, and she could hear him grinning beneath the mask. “Bruce made the gas arrow. You like it?”

“No. You guys were supposed to stay away! You know how bad this is going to be?”

“Depends.”

“On what?”

“On how much trouble this guy is still gonna be able to make for you after the cops find his two goons tied up in here with his name taped to their chests and a hacked computer that’s busy broadcasting all that information you cracked to every news agency in at least eleven different countries.”

“Fuck,” she muttered.

“Too late now. It’s already happening.”

“Do you realize…”

“What’s he going to do, Tasha?” Clint demanded. “How far is he going to get spilling the beans on one little agent when he’s going down for running an entire espionage empire? He’s going to have to pull up way, way bigger fish than you for them to fry if he wants to get anywhere.”

“This was NOT my mission. This isn’t what Fury…”

“Fury knows us. You really think he expected we would do things the way they were supposed to be done?”

“YOU weren’t supposed to do them at all! I was supposed to keep you guys out of this!”

Clint shook his head and took her arm, leading her out onto the balcony. She pulled the gas mask off and breathed deeply, feeling her head clear.

“You okay to make the jump back across there?”

“Me? How about you?”

“I did trapeze acts. You know I’ll jump across anything. Kiss for luck?”

“No. Fuck you.”

He chuckled. “That’s what I figured.”

 

 

Natasha was startled to step off the elevator with Clint and find the entire team in the living room, eating cereal and watching cartoons as if nothing interesting had happened at all.

  
“Morning,” Tony said, saluting her with a spoon.

She glared at him. “What the fuck did you do?”

“Umm… helped you bring down an international espionage operation?”

She gritted her teeth.

“By the way,” he added cheerfully, “there’s a message from Fury for you. He wants you to call him immediately.”

“Of course he does,” she said. “Because now I have to explain why you guys ended up fucking up…”

“He said he wanted to congratulate you,” Tony said. “But whatever.”

 

 

Wishing the sliding doors in the tower would slam, she stalked into her room, pulled out her phone, and hit the auto-dial.

“Agent Romanov.”

She flopped down on her bed.

“I know. I’m sorry. I didn’t tell them. I swear I didn’t. I don’t know how they…”

“Agent Romanov,” Fury said again, interrupting her. “You could give me a chance to say something, you know.”

“Yessir. Sorry.”

“Your team came through for you.”

She blinked. “What?”

“They came through for you.”

“Goddamnit, if you tell me this was all a setup…”

“Not a setup,” Fury said. “Those aren’t people I want to play with, and they really wanted someone to get into that data and get rid of it. And they had a legitimate threat, blowing your cover and your history…”

She closed her eyes. “What did they tell you?”

“Nothing I didn’t already know. I know a lot more about you than you think I do, Natasha. You think I took you in here not knowing what I was dealing with?”

“I…”

“These guys needed you to do some dirty work. I needed the lid blown off the guy they’re trying to protect. If I’d told you that, they might have found out that you’d been tipped, and you might have ended up dead. I had to send you in blind. And I did, because I knew your team would have your back.”

“I didn’t even tell them…”

“You didn’t have to, did you.”

“So what? They’re spying on me?”

“No. They’re looking out for you, Agent Romanov. Get used to it.”

He hung up.

It seemed like a very long time, but probably wasn’t, before JARVIS interrupted her silence.

“Agent Romanov, the team wishes to know if you would like some cereal, because if you do not want any, Thor intends to finish the last of the milk, but wishes to ask your permission first.”

“He can have it. I don’t like cereal.”

“Captain Rogers has offered to make you pancakes.”

She sighed. “They’re not going to let up, are they?”

“No, ma’am. They are not.”

She stood up and straightened her clothes. “All right, then. Tell them I’m coming, and that I said they’re all assholes.”

“Yes, ma’am.”


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tony's "not a good team player" side has a moment that leaves Clint in an awkward position. Fortunately, Bruce is there both to make sure Clint is all right and to deal with Tony before Natasha kills him. Well, the part about keeping Natasha from killing Tony might have to wait.

Natasha stepped away from the punching bag, wiped stray hairs out of her face, and caught her breath.

“What, JARVIS?”

“I would not bother you while training if the situation did not require it,” JARVIS said. “Agent Barton has requested your assistance.”

“My assistance? With what?”

“He requested that I find Dr. Banner first, but Dr. Banner is in the lab and wearing hearing protection at the moment, and the situation seems somewhat urgent.”

“What did Clint get himself into now?”

“I believe this particular situation may have more to do with Mr. Stark’s behavior than Agent Barton’s, but…”

Natasha sighed and gave the punching bag one more vicious kick before heading for the door.

 

 

Finding Clint naked except for the leather cuffs around his wrists and ankles and tied to Tony’s bed didn’t really surprise Natasha; she had expected something of the sort when JARVIS politely warned her that she might wish to avert her eyes. She had somewhat expected Tony to be there too and demanding assistance with Clint being a pain in the ass, but Tony was nowhere in sight, and that was when the awareness hit her that something was much more wrong than she’d realized.

Clint didn’t look at her, but kept his eyes fixed on the ceiling.

“What the hell is going on, Clint?” she demanded.

“Just let me go, please.”

She didn’t like the flat tone of his voice, not at all. It only took her a moment to unbuckle the straps around his wrists, and then the ones around his ankles, but he sat up very slowly, still looking straight ahead.

“Clint,” she said, waving her hand in front of his face.

He blinked. “It’s fine. Thanks. I’m sorry JARVIS had to bother you, but I didn’t figure it was a good idea to take the bed apart.”

“It’s not fine. Did Tony put you like that? Where the hell did he go? Doesn’t he know you can’t just leave someone like that? Fuck… I’ll tear him a new asshole.”

“He doesn’t think about stuff like that. You know that,” Clint said, his voice still disturbingly hollow and even.

“He has to, if he’s going to…”

The door slid open.

“Did I miss something?” Bruce asked. “I just got JARVIS’s messages. I was using the hydraulic press. What the hell is going on?”

“Did you know Tony had Clint up here?”

“No… Clint came down to the lab a little while ago, but I was sort of busy, and I couldn’t hear anything, and then he and Tony left. I didn’t…”

“I said, it’s fine,” Clint repeated.

“It is not fucking fine for someone to leave you restrained like that and walk out on you!” Natasha snapped.

Bruce frowned. “Wait, what?”

“Tony left him here. In four-point restraints, with no easy way to get himself out… and he LEFT him here.”

“Shit,” Bruce muttered. “What… don’t suppose you want to tell us why, do you?”

Clint shook his head.

“I’m going to kill him,” Natasha said.

“Leave it alone,” Clint said quietly.

“No, I will not…”

“Leave it alone, Tasha… please.”

She muttered a few curses under her breath. Calling her by her pet name and saying “please” in the same sentence was pretty much guaranteed to work and he knew it.

“What do you want me to do?” she asked. “You’re not okay. I can tell just to look at you. Can I take you back to your room? What can I do?”

“I don’t need anything. I’m fine.”

“You’re not going to tell me anything, are you?”

“Nope.”

“Will you at least talk to Bruce if you won’t talk to me?”

“Maybe.”

“Can we step out in the hall for a second?”

Bruce nodded and let Natasha drag him into the hall.

“Look, if you’re planning on coming up with some excuse about Tony being how he is that lets him off the hook for this…”

“I’m not letting him off the hook for anything. You don’t have to be an expert at this stuff to know that’s not how you treat anybody, especially somebody who’s willing to trust you enough to submit to you.”

She exhaled, and he watched her jaw unclench. “All right. But you have to make sure he gets it. He can’t fucking play with Clint like that. It’s not safe. It’s the complete and total opposite of safe. Clint’s head still isn’t right from what Loki did to him, and he and I are both…”

“I know. Seriously… I do. I listen. I mean, I try to. I try to understand. I know this is a really fine line Clint’s walking, needing this submission thing when he doesn’t really have any good reason to trust anybody… I’ll do my best. I promise.”

“I believe you,” she said. “And Clint’s not going to open his mouth to me about it because he knows I’ll just be out to strangle Tony with an electrical cord no matter what he says. Just… be careful with him.”

“I’m always careful with him.”

“I know.”

 

 

It really didn’t seem to make sense that he should be the one dealing with situations like this, Bruce thought to himself. He wasn’t any less screwed up than any of the rest of them and psychology was not one of the things he had a degree in. But Clint was still sitting on the bed, knees pulled up and arms hooked over them, his expression blank, and it definitely wasn’t all right just to leave him like that. So he walked toward the bed and, when Clint didn’t protest, sat down cross-legged beside him.

“So which one of Tony’s seemingly infinite number of buttons got pushed this time?” he asked.

Clint smiled wryly. “You know how much he likes not being the best at anything.”

“Yeah. It’s not really his thing.”

He waited for a moment, and eventually Clint glanced over at him.

“He doesn’t get why… why I can’t…”

“What?”

“Why I can’t… go under. For him. Like I can for you. Or Thor. Or Tasha. He knows how I work… he knows I want that… but it doesn’t work with him. I can’t. He’s not…”

“You know what the thing is that Thor and Natasha and I have that Tony doesn’t?” Bruce asked.

Clint raised an eyebrow. “An ego smaller than Nevada?”

“Patience.”

Clint nodded slowly.

“That’s what he doesn’t get, isn’t it?” Bruce asked. “That nobody’s so good at taking you to that place that we can just snap our fingers and you go there. That it takes patience and being able to read you and let you fight if you need to and be a pain in the ass if you need to, and being able to take you down at whatever speed you can let yourself go at.”

“Pretty much,” Clint murmured, and Bruce felt the bed shift slightly as Clint slid just close enough to let his knee and elbow rest against Bruce’s. “And you know? I like Tony. And I know he just wants… he doesn’t want anything bad to happen to anyone. And I was trying to go with it, but I can’t, and he knew it, and he just got pissed off that he couldn’t do it.”

  
“Yeah. Tony doesn’t take failure well, but he definitely doesn’t take it well in bed. Maybe that’s why he never used to sleep with anybody more than once.”

Clint shrugged.

“Are you okay?” Bruce asked. “I mean, I know. You’re Agent Barton and I’m sure you’ve been tied up and left in a lot worse positions in a lot more dangerous places… but not by someone you gave permission.”

“That’s the thing,” Clint said quietly. “If you’re working, and somebody catches you in a back alley at gunpoint and hauls you off and straps you down and fucks with you, tries to kill you, whatever… it’s work. I know how to do my job. I didn’t agree to any of that and it’s just shit I have to deal with to do my job.”

“But you let Tony put you there. Because you trust him. And then he went and let his ego get in the way of his main job, which was supposed to be taking care of you.”

“I don’t need taken care of.”

Bruce shook his head. “If you let someone tie you up, put you down, put you in that headspace… you do need taken care of. You’re putting yourself in a position where you need to be taken care of and you need to trust us to take care of you. Tony doesn’t get that because he doesn’t know how to take care of people.”

“You do,” Clint murmured.

“I don’t know why,” Bruce said. “I just try to listen. And try to get it. That’s about it.”

Clint finally raised his head and turned to look at him.

“Seems to work.”

Bruce shrugged. “It’s only fair. You guys trust me to hang around even though I might turn into a gigantic killing machine at any moment…”

“The Other Guy isn’t a killing machine,” Clint argued.

“Isn’t he the one who threw you across the roof and broke your ribs and gave you a concussion?”

“That was Loki’s fault. But I don’t think it would work anymore. He knows me better now.”

“The Other Guy?” Bruce said, looking down. “Yeah. You could say that.”

Clint raised his eyebrows. “What’s what supposed to mean?”

“Well… the Other Guy likes the rest of the team, and he… you know, likes Tony… but he REALLY likes you. A lot.”

Clint smiled slightly. “Does he. And… I mean, is he in there, right now, thinking that?”

“If you’re asking whether I know what he’s thinking and he knows what I’m thinking… some of it. We’re not separate, but we’re not the same person. So… yeah. I have a pretty good idea what he’s thinking about you. And please, please, please don’t tell me that turns you on… it’s fucked up enough that it gives Tony a hard-on thinking about the Hulk lusting after him…”

“Can’t say it turns me on,” Clint said, chuckling. “But I guess I was just thinking that most of what the Hulk knows about me, he knows through you, right?”

“Yeah.”

“So if you really thought I was… I mean, after everything that happened…”

“Are you kidding? Have you not noticed by now that I pretty much never pass up an opportunity when Tony suggests we come find you…”

“I thought you were just going along with Tony. You know. To protect him from me.”

Bruce grinned, embarrassed. “Not exactly.”

“Then why… never by yourself?”

“I guess I figured I wasn’t… exciting enough, by myself. I mean, Tony’s… you know. Tony Stark. Genius billionaire playboy philanthropist. Iron Man. All that…”

“You selling yourself short, Bruce?”

“What have I got, besides the ability to transform into a big green guy that breaks things?”

“Apparently, a lot more than you think. Why do you think you were the first person I had JARVIS call?”

“Umm… I assumed you just figured I was the one who should deal with Tony for being an idiot.”

“Because I knew you’d understand. Which you did. And I knew you would be the one who was more worried about staying here and talking to me than going and finding Tony and strangling him.”

“Thor’s not much for chit-chat?”

“It can be a little awkward, since he’s not from this planet and all that.”

Bruce chuckled. “Yeah, well…”

He was going to say something else, but it was silenced by Clint’s hand on the side of his face, turning his head toward him, and then Clint’s mouth on his, demanding and desperate and hard. Something in Bruce’s head told him he probably shouldn’t be playing with a possibly traumatized and possibly dangerously tight-wired master assassin at this particular moment, but he wasn’t going to listen to it. He’d been wondering for long enough if Clint would ever kiss him like this when they were alone together, or whether it was just his role as designated supervisor of Clint and Tony play-time that even involved him at all. He wasn’t going to get a much stronger answer than this, especially when Clint grabbed for his wrist and pulled his hand to rest on his cock, already hardening just from the kiss.

“Shouldn’t sell yourself short,” Clint murmured. “You have no idea what you can do to me, do you?”

“I figured between you playing with Tony and with Thor, there probably wasn’t much left for me to do, you know?”

“Tony is… shit. You know what’s sexy about him. It gets you too.”

“Every time,” Bruce admitted.

“And Thor is… he’s more like a force of nature than a partner,” Clint said. “Which is… I mean, sometimes it’s… I don’t think they make words to describe what it is. But he’s always the demigod, and I’m always not.”

“You saying there’s a niche in there for me?” Bruce asked, letting his mouth slide down to Clint’s throat as Clint obligingly tipped his head back.

“Yeah. Maybe sort of one that nobody’s been in before.”

“I don’t want to let you down, Clint. I’m not…”

“You’re wasting your time. Haven’t you figured out I don’t listen very well?”

“You listen very, very well sometimes,” Bruce said, and he didn’t even realize his voice had slid just slightly into that different tone until he felt Clint’s muscles loosen slightly, saw his eyes change.

“I can,” he murmured. “Just got to talk to me the right way.”

“I’ve seen you listen very, very well. To everything I told you to do. Listened perfectly. Did very well.”

“Did I?”

Bruce’s hand ran up the back of Clint’s neck, soothing, reassuring. “Yeah. Very well. You don’t know how good you are. You have no idea. You like to make things difficult but you’re just making people earn the right to see you like this… and they should have to earn the right. Shouldn’t be free. It’s too good to be free.”

Clint slumped forward, letting Bruce’s hand slide down his back.

“Yeah?”

“You know that. Or you should, anyway. You don’t know… fuck. Do you know how good you look? How good you feel? You know what it’s like to watch you do something just because I told you to and you’re listening to me?”

He felt a slight shiver under his hand, and a low hum from Clint that sounded like a good thing.

“Tell me what you want me to do right now.”

“You sure you want to…”

“Just tell me what to do.”

“All right,” Bruce said. “Lay back. Get comfortable. Stretch out.”

Clint rolled, sprawled out on the bed, eyes dark. “Now what?”

“Just stay right there for a minute. I’m enjoying the view.”

Clint rolled his eyes. “You’ve seen it before. Think of something to do with it.”

Bruce chuckled. “Okay, okay. You stay right there, though. And relax. And let me…”

He leaned over and let his fingers trace down Clint’s body from his throat to his cock, then stroke lightly along the length of it. Clint shuddered and arched up.

“I told you to relax. And stay still.”

“That’s not fair!”

“Be quiet. I’m busy.”

He was very busy, but it took Clint a few minutes to realize it, because he was busy in the slow, methodical, patient way that Bruce always worked, the steady and consistent counterpoint to Tony’s flashes of genius and distractibility. Having Bruce’s hands and mouth work over his body wasn’t like anything else he could think of, except possibly some kinds of torment Natasha had decided to inflict upon him in the days when they hadn’t been able to keep their hands off each other. This was something she would do, force him to lay still and submit to her whims, just because she could. And somehow Bruce was doing it too, keeping him as perfectly still as if he’d been tightly bound, but with nothing but his voice and his words.

“Not fair…” he attempted again.

“Hush,” Bruce said, tracing Clint’s chest with his fingers. “Or else I’ll keep playing with you till you can’t talk anymore.”

“Fuck…”

“Getting there. Don’t worry.”

 

 

Bruce could probably have tormented Clint forever, watching him gradually crumble into a squirming ball of desperate need as he tried to stay still under the patient onslaught.

“Please…”

“You’ve been very good,” Bruce said.

“I’ve been a fucking angel,” Clint muttered, hands clenched in the sheets.

“You have. I’m impressed.”

“You just going to do this all day?”

“Actually, I was going to fuck you now.”

Clint’s eyes flew open. “Please. Damnit. I need…”

“Shh. I know. Stay right there.”

He reached for the lube that was always on Tony’s nightstand, contemplating that next time he got to have Clint like this, he was going to have to take the time to get out some of the toys that Tony flatly refused to let him test out on him. It was past the time for playing with toys, though; that would just be cruel, with Clint already breathless and wild-eyed and pleading. He barely made a sound as Bruce slid two fingers into him, but arched his hips up in an attempt to push them deeper.

“Take it easy. I don’t want to hurt you.”

“You’re not going to hurt me. And if you did, I’d like it.”

“Yeah, but I don’t want to,” Bruce said, hooking his fingers in a way that dissolved Clint’s attempt at words into a low moan.

“You’re fucking killing me. Please.”

“You sure you’re…”

“Damnit, if you don’t fuck me now I’ll go find someone else to do it!” Clint burst out, but Bruce noticed he still hadn’t moved from where Bruce had told him to stay.

“All right. You’ve earned it,” he said, kneeling back to get rid of the clothes he’d been gradually working at removing along the way. “You know, I’m not…”

“If you’re going to tell me how you’re not fucking Thor again, I don’t want to hear it…”

“Fine, fine,” Bruce muttered, running his slick hand over his own cock, which he’d been trying to ignore and which was now demanding attention. “Then you’ll just have to be happy with what you get.”

“Come on…”

He hadn’t expected Bruce to thrust into him in one smooth, steady motion, and it forced a gasp out of him, but before he could catch his breath, Bruce had drawn back and was sliding in again, and again. It didn’t take him long to get Clint’s legs arranged and get himself angled to let him hit that spot with each inward thrust and then drag back over it each time he pulled back, and it didn’t take long for Clint’s fingers to start turning white where they were twined into the fabric of the sheets, and for his head to fall back as he tried to silence the muttered curses and half-formed words he couldn’t quite hold back.

“Is this what you wanted?”

“Yes… fuck… please…”

“I like when you say ‘please’,” Bruce said, breathless, and couldn’t help but grin, because Clint was grinning too.

“I don’t say it very often.”

“You’re saying it an awful lot here at the moment.”

“That’s your fault…” Clint tried to say, but Bruce’s hand had just closed around his cock and was stroking it steadily in time with his thrusts, and whatever ability Clint still had to put coherent thoughts together was completely gone as his hips jerked and he came, his body so tight around Bruce’s cock that he was fairly sure he lost the ability to think at all.

 

 

He regained some degree of rational thought, enough to realize he was slumped over Clint, and he rolled to the side, but Clint grabbed his arm to keep him from going too far.

“Mmph.”

“That’s not a word,” Bruce mumbled.

“Fuckoffasshole.”

“I think that’s, like, three or four words. Or something.”

“Aren’t you the scientist?”

“Right now I don’t think I could do math if I counted on my fingers.”

Clint made a small, satisfied sound and draped a leg over Bruce’s hip.

“Don’t get too comfortable… I’m going to have to go and…”

“No. Stay here.”

“I’m going to have to go talk to Tony eventually, you know. Anybody else is just going to make things worse.”

“Later.”

“Clint…”

“Later,” he said, and something about the way his hand gripped Bruce’s arm told him that it was more than just a request.

“Okay,” he said, running a hand over Clint’s shoulder. “I’ll deal with it later.”

“It’s not like it’s gonna matter what you say anyway.”

“It might,” Bruce said. “Tony doesn’t want to hurt people. He…”

“I know. Just… stay here. And talk about it later.”

“I can do that.”

He settled back down and rested his head against Clint’s shoulder, thinking to himself that if he stayed here too long, Natasha or one of the others might decide they should deal with Tony themselves and there could potentially be very bad results. Then again, he’d promised Natasha he would take care of Clint. And at the moment, that’s what he was doing. And that seemed more important at the moment than dealing with which member of the team wanted to kill which other member at this particular moment on this particular day.  
Clint must have had some idea what he was thinking, because he glanced up at him sleepily.

“If Tasha was gonna kill Tony she’d have done it already.”

“Yeah. That’s kind of what I figured. I’m still going to have to be the one to talk to him, though.”

“Mmph. Later. Stop talking.”

 

 

 


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clint is distracting. It's one of those things he's really good at. Meanwhile, Natasha has concluded that Bruce may not explain things the way Tony needs to have them explained, so while Clint distracts Bruce, she enlists the help of an outside party to make sure Tony gets the idea. 
> 
>  
> 
> (Sorry for the updates being slow. Things haven't been great. I'm working on it, I promise.)

Bruce tried to raise a hand to rub his face and realized his arm wouldn’t move, which was probably because Clint’s head was on it. 

“Shit. I wasn’t supposed to fall asleep. I’m supposed to be…”

“Yeah, yeah. Talking to Tony,” Clint muttered, opening his eyes. 

“Why did you let me fall asleep?”

“It shut you up.”

“Yeah, but…”

Clint yawned. “JARVIS, tell him it’s taken care of.”

Bruce frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Dr. Banner,” JARVIS said, “Agent Romanov decided that perhaps Mr. Stark might not take an explanation of his problematic behavior with full gravity if you delivered it…”

“So she figured he wouldn’t take me seriously.”

“Well, he wouldn’t,” Clint said. 

“So she decided to talk to him? That’s not going to work well.”

“Negative, Dr. Banner. Agent Romanov has elected to call in an independent party who has been known to have a way of explaining things to Mr. Stark in a way that… makes an impact.”

Bruce glanced at Clint. “Are you serious? She didn’t really…”

“Oh, she really did,” Clint said, grinning. 

“Natasha called Pepper?” Bruce demanded. 

“That is correct, Dr. Banner.”

“And does Pepper know about… you know. All of this?”

“I assume she does now,” JARVIS said. “Agent Romanov has been briefing her on the situation since she arrived. Apparently she feels that Mr. Stark needs to be made aware of the issues regarding not only his inappropriate behavior in intimate situations but his overall disregard for the well-being of his team members.”

“Shit,” Bruce muttered. 

“At least Pepper won’t kill him,” Clint said cheerfully. “Natasha might’ve.”

“You tricked me into staying up here with you just to…”

Clint laughed. “Yeah. I tricked you into sex. I’m just that good.”

Bruce rolled his eyes and sat up. “Ugh. I need a shower.”

“Shower’s that way,” Clint said, pointing. 

“And why do I have this sneaking suspicion I’m not going to be taking a shower alone?”

“No reason to waste water,” Clint said. Then his grin faded, and he lowered his eyes. “And…”

“And what?”

“And… umm.”

Not sure whether to be more puzzled or concerned, Bruce hooked an arm over his shoulder and shook him lightly. 

“Hey. What?”

“Just… was sort of thinking… that was a really nice place to be, earlier. Where you had me. I’d… kind of rather stay there for a little while, before I go back to being… you know…”

“Regular asshole know-everything Clint?”

“Yeah. That.”

“Look, you know I’m not…”

“Don’t start that shit.”

“Isn’t that what Thor is for?”

“It’s not the same. It’s good… in a different way. It’s good when I’m mad or I’m freaked out or I just can’t get out of my own head by myself and I need somebody who knows how to pull me out even if I’m fighting it. I’m not any of those things right now. I just want…”

Bruce smiled slightly and ran his fingers through Clint’s disheveled hair. “Ready to go down without a fight?”

Clint glanced up at him and half-smiled. “Maybe a little fight?”

“Wouldn’t expect anything different,” he said. “But I do need a shower and so do you.”

Clint nodded slowly, watching him, and Bruce realized he was waiting, listening, needing more than just the suggestion. The weight of the responsibility felt heavier than he wanted it to, this control… but he realized somewhere in his head that he didn’t think the Hulk had ever been as subdued or as quiet as he was right now, and he realized he knew why. For once, they were actually on the same page; the Hulk didn’t want to hurt Clint any more than Bruce did.

“Up,” Bruce said, “Go in and turn the shower on. Nice and hot.”

“Maybe I’d rather just stay right here,” Clint said, a hint of a challenge in his tone. 

Bruce knew Clint didn’t need him to respond to the challenge right now; he needed someone who could ignore it. 

“Go and get the shower running. I’m going to check on something and I’ll be in there in two or three minutes, and I expect that you’ll be getting yourself scrubbed nice and clean when I walk in.”

“Oh?” Clint asked, moving his feet toward the floor. 

“Well, yeah. Because after you get yourself scrubbed nice and clean, you’re going to do the same thing to me, and I don’t want to have to stand around and wait.”

Clint muttered something under his breath, but it didn’t matter, because he was already headed toward the bathroom. Bruce exhaled. 

“JARVIS… has Pepper talked to Tony yet?”

“No, Dr. Banner. Ms. Potts and Agent Romanov are concluding their discussion in Conference Room D, if you would like me to…”

“No, no. Please. Leave me out of it. I don’t… well, I sort of do want to know what they’re talking about… but leave me out of it.”

 

 

Natasha leaned back and put her feet up on the conference room table, studying Pepper Potts’ immaculately tailored gray suit and trying to read the expression on her face in her reflection off the window as she looked down at the city. 

“I saw Tony and Bruce coming,” she said. 

Natasha nodded. “They speak the same language.”

Pepper glanced over her shoulder. “Pretty much.”

“Does it matter?”

Pepper turned and looked at her, raising an eyebrow. “You asking how I feel about him having a relationship with someone else when he told me he couldn’t have a relationship with anyone?”

“Just curious.”

“No reason to play mind games with me, Agent…”

“Natasha,” she said. “Not playing games. I’m the one who called you asking for help, remember?”

Pepper smiled slightly. “I doubt you wanted to.”

“I’ll do whatever I have to do for Clint,” she said, without hesitation. 

“Even though he’s sleeping with everyone except you, apparently?”

“My choice.”

“Oh?”

“He and I have done each other enough damage,” she said. “It’s not good. It would never be good. We would always mess each other up.”

Pepper considered this for a moment, then came back to the table and slid into the chair she’d been sitting in. 

“Okay. So… Tony and Bruce.”

“Yeah.”

“And Tony and Bruce and Clint. And Bruce and Clint. And Tony and Clint. And Clint and THOR?”

“Yeah.”

“Isn’t Thor a demigod?”

Natasha shrugged. “Demigod, alien… we’re not sure. S.H.I.E.L.D. prefers ‘alien’ because ‘demigod’ sounds a little too religiously affiliated.”

“Is he… you know…”

Her face flushed slightly. Natasha grinned. 

“Assembled like a human? I was curious myself. But it doesn’t take much to find out… apparently Asgardians are perfectly happy to get naked for just about anyone for just about any reason, including no reason.”

“Hmm. Maybe I should visit more often.”

“We’ve sort of trained him to keep his clothes on in the public rooms. Otherwise Steve gets freaked out. He’s come a long way but he’s not quite ready to have naked gods wandering through the kitchen looking for granola bars.”

“Shame…” Pepper murmured. Then, glancing sideways at Natasha, “But there are cameras everywhere in the building, right? JARVIS records everything.”

“He does.”

“Including…”

“Including personal things. Although they fall under different levels of access.”

“What do you have access to?”

“Anything the hell I want,” Natasha said, reaching for the laptop on the counter behind her. “Tony thinks his security is so good that he doesn’t even bother to run checks anymore. I’ve been hacked in since I got here.”

“I’m sure there’s lots of interesting things about me,” Pepper said coolly. 

Natasha looked over at her. “Honestly? I had no reason to go looking. I’ve got nothing against you. I never did. And I never wanted anything to do with Tony, either. The only private information I get into is information I need for my job.”

“Your S.H.I.E.L.D. work?”

“Protecting Clint.”

“From what?”

“Himself, mostly. He’s… a little self-destructive. Or a lot, depending.”

“Hmmm. So the videos of him…”

Natasha raised an eyebrow. “I might have watched some. Thor was playing pretty hard with him and I wanted to make sure he understood where the safety limits on a human being were. Which, by the way, he very much does.”

“Oh,” Pepper said, thoughtful. 

“You wondering if I happen to have quick access to any of those videos with Clint and Thor from this laptop?”

Pepper gave her a sharp look. “Why?”

“Because I have permission from Clint and from Thor to watch them any time I want. And let’s just say they’re worth seeing more than once.”

That finally drew a hint of a smile, and Pepper leaned back in her chair, relaxing slightly. “I didn’t know you engaged in recreational activities, Agent… Natasha.”

“Everybody has to have some fun sometimes,” she said. “Here.”

She slid the laptop over to Pepper, who turned the screen to face her and then sat in wide-eyed silence for a long few minutes, staring. Natasha didn’t even have to guess which part of the video she was watching. 

“If everyone in Asgard had an ass like that, Loki might have had better luck taking over the world,” Pepper muttered. 

“Yeah.”

“And that…”

“Yeah.”

“Have you…”

“That big? No.”

“How does Clint…”

“Clint likes anything that pushes his limits. And he still limps for a week after Thor’s been…”

“Wow.”

Natasha watched her lick her lips almost imperceptibly. 

“Umm… black leather and nothing else is kind of a good look for Clint.”

“If it was up to most of us, that would be his entire uniform,” Natasha agreed. 

“I… wait a minute. JARVIS didn’t do any of this zooming in or switching camera angles or any of that, did he?”

Natasha smiled. “I might have edited my own version… for my own private use.”

“I don’t suppose you feel inclined to share it… for someone else’s extremely confidential and private use, with the assurance that no one else would ever see it?”

“I might,” Natasha said. “Shall we consider it a peace treaty?”

Pepper reached into her bag and pulled out a USB stick, handing it to Natasha. 

“Not necessary. As I understand it, we were never really enemies. But I’ll accept it as thanks for showing up here and dealing with Tony making a million excuses for why it’s not his fault he doesn’t know how to deal with people and he shouldn’t be expected to because he’s a genius and all that bullshit.”

Natasha handed the USB stick back to her. “All yours. I’m trusting you to keep it to yourself.”

“I might not be a secret agent, but I can keep secrets,” Pepper said, and this time her smile was more genuine than it had been since she’d walked into the building. “Now, do we know where Tony is hiding out?”

“JARVIS?” Natasha asked. 

“Mr. Stark is in his lab and has set the doors to ‘no entry’.”

“Well, set them to ‘Natasha overrides Tony’s bullshit,” she said. 

“Yes, ma’am. Settings adjusted. Do you wish me to notify him that Ms. Potts is coming to see him?”

“Oh, no,” Pepper said. “That’d give him a chance to run.”

 

 

 

Bruce walked into the steam-filled bathroom, holding up the jeans he’d pulled on despite there being no one but Clint around. 

“Hello? You okay in there?”

“Yeah… except that you’re slow.”

“You could try having a little patience,” Bruce muttered, sliding the shower door open, and as soon as he did he forgot whatever he’d been saying about patience or anything else, because Clint was standing with his face under the water and his bare ass turned straight toward Bruce, the water running over his shoulders and down his back. He stepped back, wiped his face, and grinned. 

“All nice and clean. Smell like a rose.”

“Tony’s body wash smells like roses?”

“Actually, it smells like some kind of overpriced cologne, but there was a bar of regular soap under the sink that actually smells like soap,” Clint said, handing it to him. Bruce crossed his arms. 

“I thought you were going to do that.”

Clint studied his face for a moment. “Oh, yeah?”

“That’s what I told you.”

“What happens if I don’t?”

Bruce shrugged. “Game’s over and I go back to the lab and finish testing the tensile strength of our new suit alloy under the hydraulic press.”

Clint’s eyes darkened slightly. “So what happens if I do?”

“You found that out earlier, didn’t you? If you’re good, you get what you want. Or the best I can do giving it to you, anyway. And I’d really like that, because I know how good you can be…”

“Only if I’m in the mood,” Clint said, stepping closer. 

“Yeah, but I think you are in the mood. And I think you really want to do this, and you’re just being a pain in the ass.”

“That’s possible,” Clint said absently, as he pressed Bruce back against tiled wall of the shower and pressed his mouth to his throat while his hand, still holding the bar of soap, started to rub across Bruce’s stomach. “You’re furry.”

“I am not furry,” Bruce protested, not really caring much. 

“Didn’t say I minded, did I?”

“Well, last I looked, Thor looks like he’s been waxed…”

“Would you shut up with the Thor thing already?” Clint said, his soapy hand reaching lower. “I told you. It’s not the same. He’s not you and you’re not him and it would be really weird if you were.”

Bruce ran his hand through Clint’s wet hair and tried to keep his voice even despite what Clint’s hands were doing.

“You know, my hair needs washed too,” he said. 

Clint sighed. “That doesn’t sound very interesting.”

“Well… make it interesting. You’re good at that.”

He watched something shift across Clint’s face. 

“Yeah. I can make it interesting.”

He leaned in and brought both hands up to tangle them in Bruce’s hair, and at the same time kissed him hard enough to steal the breath he’d been preparing for whatever he was going to say, pinning Bruce against the wall with his body, and there was so much bare skin against bare skin that it made it just about impossible to think rationally at all. 

“Is that interesting enough?” Clint asked, pressing his teeth into Bruce’s shoulder as his hands rubbed the soap through his hair. 

“Absolutely. But now you’re getting soap in my eyes.”

“Big baby,” Clint said, grinning as he pulled Bruce under the water. 

“Fine. I’ll put soap in your eyes and see how you like it.”

“I can think of other places you could put soap, but I already cleaned those places pretty well,” Clint said. “Of course, maybe I’d better check again…”

Before Bruce could respond, Clint slid smoothly to his knees and his rough cheek was sliding along the length of Bruce’s cock. 

“Fuck…” he murmured. “I thought we were getting cleaner, not dirtier.”

“Got clean. Now dirty,” Clint said, interrupting himself to flick his tongue out and lick across wet skin. 

“I don’t…”

“Hmm?”

“This…”

“Are you trying to say something?”

“Damnit, Clint…”

Clint laughed and sat back on his heels. “What?”

“I don’t… if you do that right now, that’ll be it for me, and I’m not eighteen and I’m not a demigod and I won’t be ready to go again in five minutes…”

“Did you have something else in mind?”

Bruce reached down and grabbed him by the arms and pulled him up to look him in the face. 

“Yeah. Something that’s good for you. Isn’t that how this is supposed to work?”

“Depends on who you ask,” Clint said. 

“Well, you asked me,” Bruce said, reaching up to make sure the last of the soap was rinsed out of his hair. “Reach out there and grab us a couple of towels.”

 

 

They hadn’t done a very good job of drying off before they hit Tony’s bed, but at least they bothered to make some attempt. Bruce tried to, anyway, before Clint stripped the towels off both of them halfway across the room and then pushed Bruce backwards onto the bed. 

“Hey!” he protested. 

“You said I could have what I wanted,” Clint said, eyes dark, as he settled on his knees, straddling Bruce’s thighs and looking down at him. 

“Yeah, but…”

“You don’t like this?”

“I do like this,” Bruce said. “But not so fast.”

Clint scowled. “Why not?”

“I said you could have what you wanted. I didn’t say I wouldn’t make you work for it.”

Clint cursed under his breath. “What do I have to do?”

“Anything you want… but slowly.”

“Fuck…” Clint muttered, reaching for the lube on the bedside stand and reaching down to slick the stuff over Bruce’s cock. 

Bruce grabbed his hand and stilled it. 

“Slower.”

Clint muttered something unintelligible but probably insulting. Still, he let Bruce’s hand guide his, moving it deliberately and steadily. 

“That slow.”

“I want…”

“Only if you can follow directions.”

That look slid across Clint’s face again, the one where the stubbornness slipped away and was replaced by a sudden sort of calm. 

“I can follow directions.”

“Okay, then. Like I said, nice and slow. I don’t want this to be over too fast.”

Clint raised himself up and lowered himself onto Bruce’s cock, his breath careful and controlled. Bruce realized that without even knowing it, he’d reached up and locked his fingers into Clint’s hips with a desperate grip, holding him where he was until he could get control of himself again. Clint grinned down at him. 

“You okay?”

“You feel way too damn good.”

“Sorry.”

“You are not.”

“You’re right.”

He leaned forward, resting his weight on those powerful arms and shoulders shaped by years of practicing hundreds of shots with a bow most people couldn’t even draw, and started to move.

Bruce tightened his grip. “Too fast.”

“Damnit…”

“I told you. Slow.”

“That’s not fair.”

“You going to whine or follow directions?”

Clint growled, but he settled back slightly onto his heels, balanced himself, and leaned into Bruce’s hands. 

“Fine. Show me.”

Bruce steadied his hands and pulled Clint’s hips toward him. “Like that. Slow.”

“Slow is boring.”

“Slow means it won’t be over in ten seconds, which is what’s going to happen otherwise,” Bruce said. 

Clint laughed, but he kept the pace Bruce’s hands set for him, kept it smoothly and steadily, even after Bruce was so far gone he had to let go and reach up over his head to twist his fingers around the bars, just to have something to grab that he didn’t have to worry about hurting. His eyes were fixed on Bruce’s face, dark and calm and distant and intense all at the same time. 

“Following… directions,” he murmured, breathing hard. 

“I know… so good…” Bruce managed. 

“Told you I could.”

“Course you can… you’re fucking amazing…”

“I’ve been good… let me go…” Clint gasped, teeth clenched. 

“You’ve been good,” Bruce agreed. “Come for me.”

Clint’s head tipped back and his eyes drifted closed as Bruce’s hand closed around his cock, and his hips jerked sharply, desperately, into the release he’d been holding back. His body tightening almost painfully around Bruce’s cock was enough to send spots flashing across his vision and have him saying words that he couldn’t hear or comprehend. 

 

 

He tried to drag himself back to full awareness quickly, to make sure Clint was all right. When he got his eyes to focus properly, they were focused on Clint’s grinning face. 

“Hey.”

“Fuck…” Bruce mumbled. 

Clint exhaled and let himself slump down onto Bruce’s chest. “You like torturing me, or what?”

“Thor’s the one who ties you up in leather and beats you till you can’t sit down for a week, and I torture you?” Bruce chuckled. 

“You make me do it to myself. That’s worse.”

“Good. You deserve it.”

Clint looked around. “We made a pretty good mess of Tony’s room.”

“Tony doesn’t use it anyway,” Bruce said. “He sleeps in the lab most of the time, when he sleeps.”

“I wonder if Pepper got to him yet.”

“I’m sure she did. She and Natasha aren’t the kind of women who waste time. JARVIS, what’s Mr. Stark doing?”

“Mr. Stark is in his lab, Dr. Banner. He isn’t actually… doing anything.”

“What is he not doing, then?”

“Well, Ms. Potts spoke with him rather firmly, and then after she left, he took several extra-strength headache tablets, and since then he has been sitting at his desk staring at a blank screen.”

“Is he all right?”

“I expect so, sir,” JARVIS said. “To be honest, Mr. Stark rarely lets anything that’s said to him affect him for very long, even when it’s Ms. Potts saying it. He is, if anything, a creature of habit. However, he does learn quickly, and I expect that the visit and accompanying lecture from Ms. Potts has taught him that inappropriate treatment of his team members will result in undesirable consequences.”

“You make him sound like a dog that got whacked on the nose,” Clint said. 

“The same methods of positive and negative reinforcement are effective with most species,” JARVIS said. 

Clint snorted. 

“If I may suggest, gentlemen… the maids are on their way up to clean this floor, and while they would be happy to leave this room undisturbed if I request it, you may wish to allow them to clean it, since it is rather…”

“Yeah,” Bruce said. “Tell them to save this room for last. How long does that give us?”

“If they proceed at their usual pace and none of the other rooms are in a state of disarray, approximately one hour and forty minutes.”

“They’re fast.”

“They’re professionals, Dr. Banner.”

“Good. Then wake us up in an hour and thirty-five minutes,” Clint said, settling in next to Bruce. 

“Yes, Agent Barton.”


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> SUMMARY: A short chapter in which the team (minus a sulking Tony) discuss why they'd all still be arguing constantly even if they weren't sleeping with each other, and everyone agrees that Clint has a fine ass, except Steve, who doesn't want to talk about it. 
> 
> (Sorry for the short chapter, but I wanted to get this in there before stuff happens in the next part)

“Tony talking to you yet?” Clint asked, reaching for a handful of popcorn from the bowl sitting on Bruce’s outstretched legs. 

“Sort of,” Bruce said, giving Clint a sharp look as he dropped popcorn on the couch. 

“What do you mean, sort of?” Natasha asked. 

“Well, I had JARVIS ask him if I could come into the lab and get some work done, and he opened the door long enough to say something about how I could go get some work done fucking people in his bed without inviting him, and that was about it.”

Natasha shrugged and looked back at the TV screen. “Last I checked, he was the one who un-invited himself to that party, wasn’t he?”

Thor scowled. “I fail to understand his behavior, especially since he put you in the position of having to repair the damage he had done.”

“I was fine,” Clint said. 

“You’re always ‘fine’,” Natasha said, reaching for the popcorn. “Except when you’re not. And this is the wrong group of people to bother to lie about it to.”

Steve, who had been attempting to avoid the entire topic of discussion for the last three days but had been unable, despite his best efforts, to completely sidestep it, shook his head and kept his eyes studiously focused on the TV. Thor elbowed him cheerfully. 

“Why are you so serious, Captain Steve? All is well. Our little Hawk is unharmed…”

“Damnit, stop calling me that…”

“And Tony will undoubtedly stop sulking eventually…”

“He’s pretty good at sulking,” Bruce said. 

Steve sighed and crossed his arms. “I’m not happy about the team’s functionality being disrupted by… people’s intimate business.”

“You mean you’re not happy about there being arguments because people are fucking each other?” Natasha asked. 

Steve winced. “That.”

“If it wasn’t about people fucking each other, it would be about something else,” Clint said, through a mouthful of popcorn. 

“Don’t talk with your mouth full. Were you born in a barn?” Natasha chided. 

“Nope. Circus.”

“You were not born in the circus, you liar…”

“I was talking about something,” Steve said. 

“Sorry. I’ve been telling him for years to stop talking with his mouth full. It’s like trying to teach a three-year-old. You were talking about team dynamics being disrupted. And Clint was saying, if you could understand him through his terrible manners, that it doesn’t matter whether they’re being disrupted by arguments about sex or arguments about something else. And he does have a point, you know.”

Bruce nodded. “I mean, do you really think somebody with Tony’s ego is going to be able to tolerate having other people around who call him on his bullshit?”

“Clint doesn’t like it a whole lot better than Tony does,” Natasha said. 

“At least I don’t lock myself in the lab,” Clint argued. “And last I checked, you weren’t exactly Little-Miss-Accept-Criticism-Gracefully.”

“Oh, go fuck yourself.”

“And this is why the sex isn’t even the part that really matters,” Bruce said, shrugging. “The egos are still the same size either way, and everybody’s still got the same issues, and all of us have things we get defensive about even when we shouldn’t, and all of us have things we get pissed off about for reasons the rest of us don’t understand, and it’s just going to be that way.”

“It doesn’t make us work well as a team,” Steve said. 

“Sometimes,” Natasha said. “Sometimes, I think it makes us stronger. I’d rather fight our bullshit out sitting here on the couch watching a movie than try to solve it when it comes up in the middle of an actual situation. And if Tony’s going to melt down every time his self-esteem gets dinged, he’s just going to have to man up, because last I checked, only one of us was actually a deity, and the rest of us are just basically human… more or less.”

Thor chuckled. “If being a deity made me free from foolish decisions and arrogance, I would not have been cast out of Asgard… and would not have learned about Midgard as I did, as a mortal.”

“So the deity can admit he occasionally has an ego problem, but the guy with serious untreated mental health issues, just starting with the PTSD and not even mentioning the narcissistic personality disorder…”

Bruce gave Clint a questioning look. “You want to talk about personality disorders? You and Natasha are the two most paranoid people I’ve ever met, next to Nick Fury…”

“It’s not actually paranoia if people really are trying to kill you,” Natasha said, helping herself to some more popcorn. 

“So what about when they’re not?”

“That part’s mostly paranoia,” she agreed. “And yeah, you want to talk about PTSD? I don’t even know which of my nightmares are about things that really happened and which of them were implanted just to terrify me. So I’m not going to argue.”

Thor frowned and touched her arm. “Perhaps if you were more willing to confide in…”

“I’ve got it all on pretty good lockdown and I think I’ll keep it there,” she said. “I function just fine the way I am, except for the part about actually having to have normal relationships with other people.”

“Isn’t that the part none of us are very good at?” Bruce asked. 

“Thor’s pretty good at it,” she said. “Except for the part where he’s not actually human and it kind of starts to show occasionally.”

Thor beamed. “I am pleased that you consider me skilled in this sort of thing.”

“He’s a little weird sometimes,” Clint said. 

“Says the guy whose main hobbies are heights, pointy things, and being physically and psychologically damaged on purpose,” Natasha muttered. 

“Okay, so… none of us are exactly normal functioning people,” Bruce said. “And that’s why there’s going to be fights. But it’s also why we’re here. Because when it comes right down to it, there are enough people who just do regular things and solve problems the usual way. Then, sometimes, that doesn’t work. And then there’s people like us.”

Steve sighed. “Yeah… I still wish it didn’t have to involve so much…”

“Chaos? Disorder? Ridiculous things that have nothing to do with saving the world?” Natasha asked. “Unfortunately, I think that just comes with the territory.”

“Well, if it does, I guess I might as well get used to it. Can I have some of that popcorn before Clint drops ALL of it between the couch cushions?”

“Fuck off,” Clint mumbled. 

“I think I’ll just have popcorn,” Steve said. “By the way, who picked this movie? It’s terrible.”

All fingers pointed at Clint, except Clint’s, which tried to point at someone who wasn’t pointing at him and failed. 

“You can all fuck off,” he muttered. 

“So remind me again why everybody wants to sleep with you when you’re constantly being childish?” Natasha asked. 

“In my opinion, it has something to do with his spectacular buttocks,” Thor observed. 

Clint flushed slightly. “Great. So everyone likes me for my ass.”

“I swear my opinion of you has absolutely nothing to do with your ass,” Steve said, straight-faced. 

“It is a pretty nice ass,” Natasha agreed. 

“I’d have to second that,” Bruce added. 

“Can we not have this discussion anymore?” Clint suggested. 

“His arms are pretty nice too,” Bruce said. 

Natasha grinned. “Yeah. I’d noticed.”

“I thought I said we weren’t having this discussion anymore.”

“Yeah, well, after you tell people to fuck off a few times, they stop caring if they piss you off,” Natasha retorted. 

“We could talk about someone else’s ass, if you prefer,” Thor offered. 

“How about we talk about something that’s not about asses?” Steve suggested. “Like… I don’t know. Baseball. Or what’s for dinner. Or… something other than asses.”

“It’s Bruce’s turn to figure out dinner,” Clint said. 

“It’s yours, and you know it.”

“Damnit.”

 

.  
.  
.


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The team is called on to deal with a situation that requires precision, teamwork, and diplomacy. It's probably a really good thing Tony decided to stay home.

Natasha enjoyed the unusual peace and quiet of Saturday mornings eating cereal and watching cartoons with Thor; no one else was usually awake yet except Steve, who if he was awake was either jogging or training or doing something else productive. At first, that had been Natasha’s usual habit as well, until after a few Saturday mornings of walking through the living room and finding Thor in his boxer shorts, his feet on the coffee table, eating cereal out of a Pyrex casserole dish and grinning at the television. She wasn’t sure how many Saturdays ago it had been that she decided to show up in the living room in her loose sweatpants instead of her workout gear and flop down on the couch beside Thor with a bowl of cereal, but it was what she’d done every Saturday since, and she didn’t recall Thor ever saying a word about it. It was one of the things she liked about Thor; when nothing needed to be said, he was quite content in silence. And after the evening before, which had been mostly spent arguing until Clint left because he didn’t like everyone complaining about his dinner selection (pizza, again) and Steve left because he didn’t like Clint’s comment about how Steve had a nicer ass than him anyway and the following discussion about the various qualities that defined a nice ass, she was more than prepared for some peace and quiet. 

Of course, this could not be allowed. 

“Please pardon the interruption,” JARVIS said, in his calmest and most soothing voice, “but…”

“Fuck that,” another voice interrupted, and Natasha sat up abruptly, and Thor frowned. 

“Is that Director Fury?”

“Yes, it is. And I damn well better have everybody’s attention. Respond immediately. Barton!”

Natasha heard Clint’s sleepy voice over the speakers “This better not be a joke.”

“Get your ass out of bed and ready to roll. Romanov!”

“Present, sir.”

“At least someone knows how to follow some fucking protocol. Banner!”

“Mmmphh…”

“I think that means ‘present, sir’ in half-awake Bruce language,” Natasha said. 

Fury muttered something under his breath. “Yeah. Thor!”

“I am ready for battle as soon as I am called upon!” Thor declared, with enthusiasm. 

“That’s more like it. Stark!”

No one answered. 

“Stark!”

JARVIS responded, somewhat gingerly. “Sir… Mr. Stark is not responding.”

“Why the hell not?”

“He hasn’t talked to any of us for days,” Natasha said. “He’s locked in his lab.”

“Why?”

“There was an incident. He didn’t like the way it turned out.”

“What kind of incident?” Fury demanded. 

“Team management issues,” Steve’s voice broke in. “Tony isn’t always… fully compliant with appropriate team protocols.”

“Imagine that,” Fury muttered. “So what happened?”

“Apparently, this is what you get when you tell Tony he’s wrong,” Natasha said. 

“Damnit… I need the team and I need them now.”

“This better not be another training exercise you had your college interns put together,” Clint mumbled, still sounding half awake.

“This is going to be a lot of innocent people dead, if the intel I received is accurate.”

“Well, that’s different,” Clint said. “What do we have?”

“You know about the whole protest thing …”

Natasha nodded; the news stations for the last few days had been full of reporters covering the story of the growing group of nonviolent protestors gathering along Wall Street to protest something or other about the World Bank and third world country economies and other things Natasha didn’t personally pay much attention to; she’d been deep enough to know there were bigger forces than banks at work in the world and that they didn’t care about a bunch of random civilians with posters on sticks. She’d heard nothing, though, about any sign of violence or disruption, and certainly not anything that would require the Avengers instead of regular police to handle it. 

“The right to peaceful protest…” Steve began.

“Cut it, Captain. I don’t give a shit about the peaceful protestors. They’re the city’s business.”

“So what part of it is our business?”

“The part where I have intel indicating that there are a team of individuals with links to a known terrorist group entering the protest area and that it appears that they intend to plant explosive devices in the crowd.”

“They’re going to set off bombs in the middle of a crowd of people?” Bruce asked. 

“The intel indicates that they’ve located several areas to plant the devices to achieve maximum injury and loss of life.”

“Fuck,” Clint muttered, and Natasha was fairly sure she could hear him rummaging in his closet. 

“You can’t just have the police detain them?” she asked. 

“I don’t like the idea of the Avengers being used as a police force,” Steve agreed. 

“Neither do I,” Fury said. “I’d be getting calls every two minutes. The issue is that these guys just look like ordinary protestors. And if the cops just start grabbing anyone who looks like they might be terrorists… which we’re not even sure what these guys look like or where they’re from… there’s going to be some major issues and there could be some ugly backlash from the crowd. And it’s a big crowd. And this is New York City and we really don’t want a rioting mob trashing the area.”

“So what are we supposed to do about it?”

“My informant provided me with information that should allow an experienced individual like yourself, Agent Romanov, to track down one of the bombers. And once you do track him down, you should be more than capable of removing him from public view in a discreet manner and…”

“Yeah. Get the info on his buddies. Do we know what we’re dealing with as far as the actual bombs?”

“Indications are that this isn’t a very high-tech operation… it doesn’t look like the terrorist group in question wants this to be able to be traced back to them, so they don’t want it looking like too fancy a job.”

“TNT? ANFO?”

“What?” Thor asked, frowning.

“No info, but good chance they’re going to be using a low-grade explosive in a container device…”

“Fertilizer pipe bomb,” Clint said. 

“Something along those lines,” Fury said. 

“Right. So… Clint, no fire arrows. And Thor, no lightning… and if this is an ANFO bomb the detonators will have to be explosives too…”

“What is ANFO?” Steve asked. 

“Ammonium nitrate fuel oil mix,” Bruce said. “Easy access. Used a lot in mining operations. Almost any idiot can get their hands on some, or make their own out of fertilizer and any flammable petroleum product. And I’m assuming that you’re going to want me to sit this one out, Director.”

“Having the Hulk loose in a crowd like that might be bad,” Fury said. 

“Besides, if Tony’s going to be a dick, I’m going to need someone to be entering the data I extract and mapping the targets for the other team members. I’m going to suggest that we have Cap and Thor in full gear just to make sure we’ve got everyone’s attention and for the crowd control factor in case something goes bad, and Clint and I in plain clothes.”

“Aww…” Clint muttered. “That means I gotta wear the trenchcoat and take my smaller bow…”

“Boo-hoo,” Fury snapped. “I’ll make sure word gets out to the cops on the street at the scene that if they see anyone fitting Clint or Natasha’s description to back off and let them work. I don’t think I’ll have to tell them that about Thor or Cap.”

“Wouldn’t expect the cops to give either of them much of a hard time,” Clint said. “They go after me on sight. Always have.”

“Maybe if you didn’t look like a criminal all the time…”

“Would you all shut up and get out there?” Fury snapped. “I’ll send the photo of our one likely suspect to your phones, but I want Romanov to be the one to get her hands on him. She’ll get the most info. If one of you spots him first, get on the comm and give Bruce his location so he can flag him on the map for Romanov to go after him. Are we clear?”

“Yessir,” Natasha said, before anyone else could say anything stupid. “We’re doing this without Stark, then?”

“That’s Stark’s problem,” Fury muttered. 

“All right, then. You guys ready?”

 

 

Natasha had looked up a few news reports on the protests in the back of Tony’s black SUV on the way to the site, so she wasn’t surprised to see the large crowd spanning several blocks, most in coats and hats against the fall chill, some waving signs, others milling around somewhat aimlessly. She didn’t see any signs of pending violence, and the city police standing by their makeshift barrier had their hands in their pockets and were leaning on their squad cars, looking bored. They turned, looking somewhat hopeful, when the SUV pulled up and unloaded its passengers. 

“Hey, I thought they were kidding when they said the Avengers were coming,” one woman said. 

“What are you guys here for? I mean… it’s not exactly a dangerous crowd. I mean, there’s a lot of people out there and we don’t really want them pissed off…”

“We’re not going to piss them off,” Natasha said, raising her hands. “Just got some troublemakers that need to be dealt with. We’ll do it quietly.”

“Last I heard, nobody I know had ever used the words ‘Iron Man’ and ‘quiet’ in the same sentence,” another policeman muttered. 

“Yeah, and the Hulk…”

“Do you see Iron Man or the Hulk?” Clint asked impatiently. “We’ll be good. Promise. Well, Thor will probably be loud, but people seem to be pretty respectful when he gets loud.”

“I can imagine,” the man said, looking over at the Asgardian in his full battle armor, spinning his hammer impatiently. 

“Enough chatting, mortals. We have important business.”

“Right,” Clint said. “Cap?”

Steve looked out over the crowd for a moment, then scanned the surrounding buildings. 

“Clint, that building right there has a ledge that should give you a good view of the crowd…”

“Building’s closed. Protests.”

Steve glanced at the cop for a moment before looking back to Clint. 

“Get yourself up on that ledge and see if you can spot the guy Natasha’s after. Signal us once you’re in position, and Thor and I will go take a walk through the crowd. If we’re lucky, just finding out we’re around will make our guys nervous and flush them out. Natasha, stay near the buildings. If we spot your guy we’re going to try to push him toward you so you can…”

“Handle him discreetly,” she said. “On it. Even got my new toys.”

She held up her arms. Clint raised an eyebrow. 

“Pretty bracelets. Look a little bondage-y. Trying to give people ideas?”

She smiled and clenched her fist, and the black metallic strap around her wrist suddenly crackled with electricity. 

“Spiders bite, you know. Tony finished them for me a while ago but never got around to giving them to me, so I decided to liberate them. And you can get any ideas about bondage you want, but these things pack enough voltage to kill someone.”

“Hey, hey…” one of the cops protested. “We really don’t need any killing anyone…”

“I’m not going to kill anyone,” she snapped. “I’m just going to hurt them. Maybe a little. Maybe a lot. Depends on how much they want to tell me.”

She turned and stalked between the barriers and into the crowd. Clint glanced at the cop. 

“She knows what she’s doing.”

“What about the rest of you?”

“Debatable,” Clint said. “Let’s go freak out some hippies, guys.”

 

 

Clint was crouched on his balcony perch, watching the crowd, when he heard Thor’s voice on the comm. 

“Captain Steve, I believe I may have spotted the man…”

“Good. Give Natasha his location…”

“Well, he’s standing near a girl in a red coat…”

“No… pull up the map on your phone and input his location on the map.”

Thor cleared his throat, and Clint chuckled. 

“Even I learned how to use the map!” Steve complained. 

“I was busy,” Thor muttered. 

“Fine. Clint, can you see Thor?”

“Yeah, I see him.”

“Thor, where is the guy standing in relation to you?”

“He is perhaps twenty paces directly ahead of me. He is wearing the blue cap and has the same beard as in the photograph, but he appears to have put a coat on. He is carrying a backpack…”

“So are half the people here,” Clint said. “We gotta be sure this is our guy. Thor, has he noticed you?”

“I believe everyone has noticed me, but he doesn’t know I’m aware of him.”

“Well, start lurking around him and trailing him. If he’s not our guy, he’ll probably be trying to get your autograph, but if he is, he’s going to start getting edgy. You know where Natasha is? She’s right below where I am. If the guy starts acting squirrely, you and Steve start corralling him this way.”

“Squirrely?” Thor repeated, sounding puzzled. 

“Clint…” Natasha sighed. 

“Just go put some pressure on him and see what he does,” Clint said. 

“Not literally, please,” Natasha added quickly. 

“Sometimes I suspect our Hawk has his own language,” Thor muttered. 

“He does. It’s called ‘asshole’.” 

“Hey! That’s…”

“Guys… focus, please,” Steve interrupted wearily. “Thor, I’m headed your way. Start walking toward the guy and see if he starts acting nervous.”

Clint watched the tall figure in his cape and armor move through the crowd, and more than a few people looked a little nervous, although more of them seemed amused or curious. Since Natasha and Clint still worked as discreetly as possible, and since the Hulk was definitely not unanimously popular among the citizens of New York, and since Tony had a habit of saying every single thing Fury DIDN’T want him to say in an interview, Steve and Thor had been the public faces of the Avengers on a regular basis. Many of the protestors seemed more interested in getting a good look at him than in getting away from him, but Clint’s sharp eyes spotted someone acting different. 

“Steve. I see your guy. He saw Thor headed his way and now he’s headed straight in your direction, trying to keep his head down. And he’s on a cell phone.”

“Natasha, get that cell phone and I’ll give you everything you need,” Bruce’s voice came through the comm, slightly fuzzier, since he was farther away. 

“That a promise?”

“You better believe it.”

“Wasn’t the ‘no flirting on the comm line’ your rule, Tasha?”

“Fuck off, Clint. Pay attention. You’re our eyes.”

“Got him,” Steve said. “He just spotted me and veered off. Still on his phone. Definitely avoiding us. Thor, start walking up on his left and see if we can get him to head toward Natasha…”

In his attempts to stay out of sight of both Thor and Steve, the skinny young man with the blue ball cap pulled low over his face and the phone held to his ear skirted the edge of the crowd, looking over his shoulder. Clint ducked down, watching until the man was so close Clint could see the details of the scrawny goatee on his face. Then, abruptly, he vanished, and Clint heard a few muffled shouts, but none of the protestors seemed to notice over the general chatter. 

“Got him,” Natasha said. 

“You sure he’s our guy?” Steve asked. 

“That, or he’s some random other guy who fits the description and happens to be carrying four pipe bombs on timer detonators in his backpack.”

“Are the timers set?”

“Let me get back to you,” she said. Clint heard some thumping and what might have been an attempt at a scream from the alley, and then Natasha was back. “No. They were going to coordinate setting the timers once they got to their locations. He says we’ve got four other guys out there. And he’s about to provide me with descriptions. Very good descriptions. And he’s going to tell me exactly where they’re headed to plant their bombs. What? You’re not? Oh, I think you are. Because if you don’t, I’m going to electrocute you until you piss yourself, and then I’ll do it again, and in case you didn’t know, piss is a really good conductor of electricity. Use your imagination… huh. Okay. He says he’s changed his mind now.”

“Funny how that works,” Clint said. 

“Bruce, you ready to put these locations on the map for everybody as I give them to you?”

“Yup.”

With only a few more yelps from her unhappy captive, Natasha had given Bruce a list of four sites where the other men had originally planned to plant their bombs. 

“There’s a problem, though,” she said. “Since they’ve gotten word that Thor and Captain America are here, they’re likely to either change to a secondary drop site or abort the plan… which means they’ll come back and try it again when we’re not here.”

“Can we just get these assholes now, so we don’t have to do this again?” Clint asked. 

“Yeah. Sitting up on that balcony watching stuff sure is hard work,” Natasha retorted. 

“I can probably locate those guys for you,” Bruce said. 

“We have descriptions, but this is a big crowd…”

“No, I mean, I can locate them to within a couple of feet of where they’re standing. That’s why I said if you got me the guy’s cell phone I could give you everything you need.”

“GPS tracking,” she said, and Clint could almost hear her grin. “You dumb fucks weren’t even smart enough to turn that off on your phones, were you. Okay… what do I need to do to give you access?”

“Call the building and I’ll have JARVIS ready to interface directly with the phone’s memory and ID all the numbers he’s called recently, and then we can pin those phones down by their GPS.”

“Asshole here says they’re all blocked numbers,” Natasha said. 

Bruce chuckled. “Phone company wants you to think you can block numbers. Nothing’s blocked from them. They can access everything, and if they can, JARVIS can.”

“Excellent. Tell JARVIS to expect a call.”

“Can you dial the phone, talk to us, and keep that guy you’ve got out of trouble at the same time?” Steve asked. 

“Oh, he’s unconscious,” she said casually. 

“What?” Steve demanded. 

“Don’t worry. He’ll be back around in probably twenty or thirty seconds.”

“Why is he unconscious?”

“He wasn’t being polite.”

Clint noted that an increased understanding of Natasha’s methods was probably behind Steve’s lack of response, although his disapproval seemed to ooze through the comm link. 

“Oh, come on. They were looking to kill possibly hundreds of random people, and you’re mad at me for giving him a hard time?”

“Torture isn’t…”

“Hey,” Clint interrupted. “What she’s doing isn’t even tickling compared to what people have done to both of us. Tasha doesn’t play any rougher than she has to.”

“You guys have a plan for what to do with four terrorists wandering around in a crowd with pipe bombs?” Bruce asked. “Because they’re about to show up on your maps, courtesy of live GPS tracking. Unless they ditch their phones, which they probably won’t because they’re idiots, you know exactly where they are.”

“So how do we get them without getting the crowd riled up?” Clint asked. 

“Dunno. Cap?”

“Right now, the crowd seems pretty calm. Maybe if Thor and I just give these guys a little escort over to the police barrier and hand them over, they won’t make too much fuss…”

“Well, we need to get them out of there,” Natasha said. “And now. I’m looking at these bombs and they’re not a professional job… the timer detonators look pretty unstable and one of these things could trigger by accident.”

“Right,” Steve said. “Clint, give Thor directions, since he hasn’t bothered to learn how to read his map yet…”

“I was BUSY,” Thor said, sounding offended. 

“Whatever,” Clint said. “Your closest guy…”

 

 

By the time Steve and Thor arrived at the police barrier, each of them dragging two nervous-looking men wearing backpacks, Natasha had already roused her captive and deposited him in the hands of the surprised officers. Clint dropped out of the sky, or probably from some unseen ledge above, just as Steve and Thor hauled their prisoners through the police barrier. Behind them, an unhappy group was gathering and appeared to be growing, and there were shouts about police brutality and civil rights, and the police were beginning to look distinctly unhappy about the situation. Steve looked around, then shoved his two men to the officers and turned to address the crowd. 

“Is there someone I can speak to?” he called, his voice carrying over the general racket. 

A moment of jostling and shouting, and a thin black man in a trenchcoat and knitted hat emerged from the crowd and approached the barrier. 

“Careful,” one of the policemen muttered. “That guy’s one of the protest leaders. He’s a professor of law at one of the universities. Don’t give him any reason to come down on our asses.”

“Hey, Captain America!” the man called. “What’s up with the violating our constitutional right to free speech and assembly?”

Steve stepped forward, hands raised, everything about him radiating calm and cooperativeness. 

“Nobody’s rights are being violated, sir. We’re just trying to keep you safe while you exercise those rights.”

“Keep us safe? By arresting people who weren’t even doing anything? We saw you two just grabbing those young fellows right out of the crowd… I didn’t see any probable cause for you to be harassing them!”

Steve glanced over his shoulder and motioned for one of the cops to hand him one of the backpacks. 

“Come over here, sir, please.”

“Why? You want to arrest me too?”

“No, sir. I want to explain without shouting.”

The man strolled toward the barrier, looking supremely confident with the growing and increasingly unruly crowd behind him. Steve motioned for him to come closer. 

“Okay, now, you see these backpacks these guys all have on?”

“Lots of people wear backpacks.”

“Okay. I’d like you to very slowly and very carefully open this one.”

The man raised a suspicious eyebrow, but he very gingerly unzipped the bag. He stood for a long moment, studying the contents.

“Shit. How many of these guys?”

“Five. Each carrying three or four pipe bombs,” Steve said, keeping his voice low. “We’d rather the people not have to worry about things like that happening, so we felt that it’d be a better idea if we just prevented it. Do we all understand exactly why these individuals needed to be handled this way?”

“I’d say so,” the man said, handing the bag carefully back to Steve. 

The man turned around and raised his hands, and the crowd quieted slightly. 

“It’s all right, everybody. We don’t have a problem here. We’re here to protest peacefully, and if the Avengers and the police are here to help us be safe while we do that, we’re good with that. Right?”

Apparently the policeman had been right about this man having considerable influence, because with his assurance that everything was fine and that nobody was arresting people at random, the gathered gawkers wandered back off toward the main crowd. The man glanced over his shoulder and gave Steve a quick nod. 

“And that’s why we don’t let Tony do the talking,” Natasha said, exhaling. 

“Umm, speaking of…” Bruce said. “JARVIS just notified me that Tony took off in one of the suits, which means he should be there about…”

There was a familiar whooshing sound overhead, and then the police and the team stepped back as Iron Man landed among them, arms raised. 

“Ready for business!”

“Business is sort of over,” Clint said. 

Tony flipped back the mask, frowning. “What?”

“Those are the guys,” Steve said, pointing. “They’re already in police custody.”

“But… what the hell? It looks like nothing even happened here!”

“That was the idea,” Natasha said. 

“But… I’m here.”

“Yeah. We see that,” she said. “What do you want, applause? Mission’s over. If you want, you can be in charge of delivering these guys’ phones and stuff to Fury for further investigation…”

Before she could finish talking, Tony had flipped the mask back down, and a moment later he was high above their heads and headed back toward the tower. 

“I thought he liked being fashionably late,” Natasha said, shrugging. 

“If you show up after the bad guys are in custody and there’s nothing awesome left for you to do, it becomes unfashionably late,” Clint said. “Bruce, if you need anything out of the lab, better grab it before he gets back, because he may lock himself in there for another week or two.”

“The rate he travels, I won’t even make it to the elevator before he’s back,” Bruce said, resigned. “He did show up, though, right? Isn’t that a good sign?”

“It would have been if he hadn’t ended up looking like an asshole,” Clint pointed out. “That probably just made it worse.”

“Knowing the team can handle things without Iron Man isn’t going to give Tony’s ego any props,” Natasha said. “And I don’t even know who can talk to him anymore that hasn’t already pissed him off…”

She stopped and looked at Steve, and so did the others. 

“He’s always mad at me!” Steve protested. “He hates me!”

“It’s your turn to deal with him,” Clint said. 

“Says who?”

“Says you’re the team leader,” Natasha said. 

Steve muttered something. 

“Did you just curse?” she asked. 

“Maybe,” he said, scowling. “Let’s get out of here before we get any more unwanted attention.”


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's easy to blame Tony for being an asshole, especially when he seems to like being one so much. But when it comes to being careless with the well-being of a team member, it might be a little less about being an asshole and a little more about keeping a teammate's secrets, even if it means taking the fall. 
> 
> .  
> .  
> .

“I still don’t know why I have to deal with this,” Steve muttered, as he and Natasha walked down the hall toward Tony’s lab. “I don’t even know everything that happened and I don’t really want to...”

“What do you need to know?” she sighed. “Tony was an asshole and…”

Steve stopped. “Yeah, but that’s really not a good enough answer for me. Because as much as I’m not the captain of the Tony Stark fan club…”

“I think Tony’s the captain of that.”

“Yeah. Well, like I said… I may not be his best buddy or anything, but I’m not quite putting this all together as being something he’d do. I mean, just walking off on Clint because he was mad about something not going his way. Not without at least untying him, or if nothing else calling one of you to make sure you were coming to deal with him.”

Natasha leaned against the wall, biting her lip thoughtfully. “I suppose you have a point. Tony’s ego doesn’t take bruising well, but he’s not malicious, and he’s not stupid. But he still did what he did.”

“Yeah, but do you really know for sure what happened before that?” Steve asked. 

“Only one way to find out,” she answered. 

 

 

Clint complained and protested the entire way from his room to Tony’s lab, but with Steve and Natasha blocking his retreat he didn’t have much choice in the matter. 

“This is bullshit. I told you, there’s nothing to talk about. I told you guys not to make a big deal out of this in the first place. Remember? You’re the one who went and…”

“Stop,” Natasha said, rolling her eyes. “I know you well enough to know you wouldn’t be throwing a hissy-fit if there wasn’t something you didn’t want us to know. Tony’s not talking, you’re not talking, and we’ve got to get Tony back on line with the rest of the team, so both of you are going to start talking.”

“Can’t make me.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Did you forget who you were talking to?”

“You wouldn’t.”

“I can make anyone tell me anything, and you know it,” she said, stopping in front of the lab. “JARVIS, open the doors.”

“Ma’am, Mr. Stark…”

“Override.”

“Agent Romanov, Mr. Stark has reprogrammed the system to block your authorization to override it.”

“Fine. Did he block Steve’s authorization as team leader to override in the case of emergency involving the safety of the team?”

“I have that?” Steve asked. 

“Fury’s orders.”

“No, ma’am. He was not aware of that particular override. But the override command must be given by Captain Rogers or the acting designated team leader.”

Steve glanced at Natasha. “Ummm… override?”

“Yes, sir.”

The doors hissed open. 

Natasha shoved Clint in ahead of her, although there wasn’t much chance of him trying to bolt knowing Steve was behind them. Tony was nowhere in sight. 

“Come on, Tony,” Steve called. “Just going to get some things figured out, that’s all.”

“Yeah, sure,” Tony said, walking out from one of the odd corners of the lab. With his disheveled hair and oil-stained clothes pock-marked with pinprick burns from a cutting torch, it was hard to tell whether he’d been hiding from the team or just holed up in the lab obsessed with some project and no one had forced him to change or shower. “Busy. Thanks, though.”

“I don’t think so,” Natasha said. “We’re not playing this game anymore. We need you back with the rest of us.”

“Obviously you don’t.”

“Why, because we handled one fairly simple job that didn’t involve any robots or psychotic people from other planets or anything? You know perfectly well this team isn’t a team without all its parts.”

Tony glanced at Steve, then at Clint. “Yeah. Keep saying that.”

“It’s true,” Steve said. “And not just for fighting.”

“I thought that’s what I was good for.”

“That’s all any of us thought we were good for, for a while,” Natasha said. “Maybe that’s all any of us are good at alone. But we’re pretty good at some other things when we’re together.”

“What, like fucking each other up?” Tony asked, turning away. “I know what you think. And I know Clint’s not saying anything and I’m not saying anything either and you can think whatever the fuck you want.”

“We jumped to conclusions,” Natasha admitted, forcing the words out. “I jumped to conclusions. I’m sorry. If we didn’t want to know what really happened we wouldn’t be here and we wouldn’t have dragged Clint down here with us.”

“I told you guys to leave it alone,” Clint muttered, looking at the floor. “I told you it wasn’t a big deal. I told you to just let me go and leave it alone and not cause this big fucking mess…”

“Look, something happened,” Steve said, crossing his arms, a hint of impatience that made Natasha bite back a grin. “Now we’d kind of like to know what it is so we can get back to doing what we do… whatever that is, exactly.”

Tony shook his head, but he chuckled slightly. “That’s a good question.”

Natasha felt Clint shift uneasily behind her, and heard the change in his breathing. She glanced over her shoulder and was surprised to find his eyes wide and alarmed. 

“Clint?”

“Hey… I need to go.”

“Clint, what’s going on?”

“I just… for a minute… I’ll be back…”

She frowned, and now Steve and Tony were looking too, and Clint started to back away, but Natasha motioned to Steve, and he stepped between Clint and the door. 

“What’s going on?” she demanded. “Clint? Are you listening?”

“Just… go… just a minute…” he murmured, but the words were barely coherent, and his eyes had gone wild, dark and confused. “I have to go.”

“Something’s wrong,” Natasha said, stepping closer, but Clint lashed out with his fists, uncoordinated but still strong enough to hurt. “Fuck… Clint, do you know who I am?”

“He’s gone,” Tony said. “According to my research it’s a complex partial seizure.”

“What?”

“Complex. Partial. Seizure.” 

“I know what it means!” she snapped. “How the fuck did you know he was…”

Clint stumbled, and Steve caught him by the arms and pulled him back into a chair, keeping a solid grip as Clint twisted in his grasp, bewilderment and fear written across his face. 

“This is what happened, isn’t it,” she said, realizing. 

“I think so, yeah,” Tony said. 

“Why didn’t you tell us?”

“Because I know that a seizure disorder is an automatic dismissal for S.H.I.E.L.D. agents. Fury would have yanked him from the team and stuck him at a desk job for the rest of his career.”

She blinked. “You let us all be pissed at you because you didn’t want Clint to get in trouble?”

Tony shrugged. “I guess I figured he had more to lose. I’m used to everyone being pissed off at me.”

“Clint knows these are happening. He has to.”

Tony glanced over and Clint and Steve; Clint was slumped in the chair, rubbing his face, but he wasn’t fighting Steve’s hands on him anymore. His breathing was ragged and harsh, and his face was white. 

“Yeah. Apparently with partial seizures, especially ones that start in the temporal lobe, people get an aura… they see things, smell things, or just feel weird and know what’s coming. Confusion and fear are apparently pretty common. I don’t think he knows exactly what happens once the he checks out…”

“Why? What’s…”

“Residual damage from having all that alien shit in his head?” Tony suggested. “I’m not sure. But he sure as fuck doesn’t want anybody to know about it and I wasn’t going to be the one to blow his cover.”

Steve was talking to Clint in a low voice, and Natasha was relieved to see that although he still looked pale and dazed, he was looking at her with full awareness of who she was and what had just happened. 

“Tell me what happened with you two,” she said. “Now, while Clint’s still half out of it and Steve’s busy. I’ll deal with it from here, but you have to tell me.”

“Well, I guess it was only a matter of time before he ended up stuck somewhere that he couldn’t get away when the aura started,” Tony said. “Everybody’s pretty used to Clint just randomly disappearing for a little while, because he’s Clint…”

“He has been doing it a lot lately,” Natasha said. “I should have been watching him more closely.”

“Like you haven’t had anything else to think about lately…”

“Well, there’s that. But… look. Just tell me what happened.”

Tony shrugged. “You know. Things were happening. He was happy enough about it… bitching and arguing, but I’m not stupid, and we’ve got safe words for a reason, and all of us have pretty much learned at this point that with Clint, anything he says except his safe word is just him being Clint.”

“Yeah.”

“So… he started to act strange. It took me a minute to catch on to the fact that he wasn’t just complaining anymore, and he never went for the safe word, but all of a sudden he wasn’t making sense… he had that look on his face, the one he had a minute ago, like he had no idea where he was but something really bad was about to happen. I tried to talk to him and it didn’t seem like he could answer me, so I went and tried to get his hands loose, but he panicked and bit me and kicked me in the chest and knocked me off the bed. And that’s when his face started twitching and I realized something bad was going on. I left to get one of the first aid kits with the anti-seizure medication syringes in them, but…”

“You could have called one of us.”

“You think Clint would have wanted me to do that?” Tony asked. “Like I said, I know what that means for him if S.H.I.E.L.D. finds out. I figured I could get the medication into him and get him loose and he and I would deal with it… except I didn’t realize this wasn’t the same kind of seizure he was having while Loki was still playing with his brain.”

“He came out of it on his own, and faster than you expected,” Natasha said. “And he didn’t know exactly what happened, but he probably had some idea.”

“I’m sure he knew he’d had a seizure,” Tony said. “He has no idea what he said or did while it was happening. So before I got back, he woke up and you guys were there, and…”

“Damnit, Tony… you should have told us,” she muttered. 

“Why? So you could be up Clint’s ass about it?”

“No. Because it wasn’t fair to you to let us think…”

“Doesn’t matter. Like I said, I’m used to pissing people off.”

He turned to leave, but her hand on his arm stopped him. 

“Look, Tony.”

“What?”

“I used to work alone too. Everyone knew I’d come over from the other side. Most of the other agents didn’t trust me. Fury did, and that meant Coulson did… but the only one who wanted to be in the field with me, put their life on the line gambling that I really was on their side, was Clint, and I think half of that was just because he wanted to see what would happen.”

“So?”

“So… I’m used to being the odd one out too. And you think Clint was popular at S.H.I.E.L.D., coming up out of being a circus performer and a criminal when the other agents were all military-trained and squeaky clean? You know what Bruce’s life was like, even before the Other Guy joined the party. You know Steve’s still trying to figure out what he’s doing in a world where everyone he knew is dead and everything he thought was normal doesn’t exist anymore…”

“Enough of the lecture, Agent…”

“Call me by my fucking name, Tony. I’m trying to tell you that’s not how we treat each other here. And that’s got to stop being how we see ourselves here. Including me, I guess. And including you. We’re in this together. If we’re not, it hurts all of us.”

“So I was supposed to throw Clint under the bus so you all would like me better?”

“No… damnit, Tony. You really are an asshole when you want to be. But whatever’s happening to Clint we’ll deal with as a team, and that team includes you. We need you.”

Tony glanced at Clint. “I had JARVIS pull some video and scan it to try to figure out when this started and how often it’s happening. According to him, the first visual evidence he could find was about a week after Loki got evicted, and they’ve been getting more frequent since then. JARVIS averaged it at about 1.3 complex partial seizures per day… but I was watching some other videos, and I think he’s having other seizures too. They call them absence seizures… you don’t lose consciousness or anything; you just momentarily sort of check out, everything goes blank, you have no idea what happened for those few seconds or however long it lasts. I think he’s having a lot of those, but it’s not easy to tell, because Clint…”

“Is Clint, and him just suddenly deciding he feels like ignoring you is so normal that no one would notice,” she said. “Fuck. How bad is this for him? What do we do?”

“Well, I guess if his secret’s already out, the best thing to do would probably be to find a neurologist who will very discreetly and very quietly do some scans and diagnostics on him. I can probably wave some money around and make that happen, but Bruce should probably be the one to actually deal with it… he may not be a medical doctor but he plays one pretty well and I can cook him up some fake credentials. Everybody in this city knows who I am and they know I’m not a neurologist.”

“Okay,” she said, giving him a quick nod. “Can you make some calls today?”

“Yeah. But even with some money on the line, neurologists are usually pretty booked, so it will probably be a couple of days before somebody can put aside the kind of time they’re going to need.”

“Whatever it takes,” she said. “We trust you to do the best you can for him.”

He gave her a sideways glance. “You thought I was enough of an asshole to tie him up and walk out on him just because I was pissy.”

She didn’t flinch. “I told you. I was wrong. I jumped to conclusions. I should know you better than that by now, Tony. I’m not as objective as I should be when it comes to Clint and I know it. I owe you an apology. You were trying to protect him.”

Tony studied her for a moment. “I never thought I’d hear you actually apologize to me for anything. Ever.”

“It doesn’t happen often. Take it while you can get it,” she said. 

He grinned. “Apology accepted. I’ll start calling some doctors, and I’ll have JARVIS pull together whatever video documentation might be useful. You want to…”

“I’ll let the others know what’s going on,” she said. “What’s really going on, this time. And we’ll deal with it. Together.”

They both looked over at Clint, who had shrugged Steve off and was on his feet, slightly unsteady, watching them. 

“Tasha…” he murmured. 

“When were you going to tell me about this?”

“After it went away.”

She shook her head. “I don’t think it’s going away by itself, Clint.”

He lowered his head. “Yeah. I don’t think so either. I figured… you’d find out eventually. I’m sorry, Tony… I didn’t want them to blame you. I thought… I don’t know what I thought. But I couldn’t just tell them…”

Tony stepped forward and hooked an arm around Clint’s waist and pulled him in, planting a kiss on his cheek. Natasha wasn’t sure what he whispered in Clint’s ear, but whatever it was, Clint smiled, then turned slightly red, and then rolled his eyes and laughed and shoved him off. Tony grinned. 

“Okay, okay…” Natasha said, before Steve was embarrassed enough to leave. “Enough of that. I’ll talk to…”

“Thor knows,” Clint said quietly. 

“What?”

“Thor knows. I mean, at least a little bit. He knows it’s happening He doesn’t know that’s why...”

She gritted her teeth. “Fucking Thor knows and didn’t fucking tell me?”

“I made him promise not to, Tasha. You know how he is. He keeps his word. It’s my fault… he wanted to tell you.”

“Fuck… fine. I’m going to go sit Bruce and Thor and Steve down and explain everything so we know we’re all on the same page and we can get Tony back on line with the rest of us. And you are going to go to the living room and remain in full view of JARVIS’s cameras and not do anything stupid, like try to leave, because if that’s what you had in mind, it isn’t happening.”

Clint scowled. 

“Oh, come on,” she sighed. “You don’t think this team’s been through enough with you already that we deserve a little credit? We got Loki out of your head and kept the Tesseract energy from killing you. We can deal with this. If we’re lucky, it doesn’t even have anything to do with aliens or glowing cubes of interstellar weirdness this time.”

“It better not,” Clint muttered. 

“Go watch some TV. And don’t go anywhere. I’m going to talk to the guys, Tony’s going to make some arrangements… and then we’re going to sit down and watch a movie and have dinner together, all of us, like it’s supposed to be.”

“I get to pick the movie,” Tony said. 

Natasha sighed. “Fine. But Bruce gets to order food.”

“Deal.”


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> While Bruce makes sure Tony knows he's been missed, Clint decides to go missing. Well, he wasn't planning on being missing for very long, but things don't always go as planned...
> 
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> .  
> .

“I thought you were coming up to watch a movie.”

Startled out of his intent focus on the data flashing across the computer screen, Tony jumped and spun in his chair. Bruce laughed and stuck his hands in his pockets. 

“Did I scare you?”

“Maybe. JARVIS, have you decided not to bother to announce when I have visitors anymore?”

“Sir, I announced Dr. Banner’s intent to visit the lab several minutes before he arrived…”

“Oh. Right. Forgot about that.”

Bruce shrugged. “That’s okay. We figured you’d be distracted down here ignoring everybody. That’s why I came down to get you.”

“Hmm. So Natasha gave everybody a little talk?”

“She did.”

“And?”

“You’re an idiot.”

Tony raised an eyebrow. “Why’s that?”

“Because you knew perfectly well Clint couldn’t keep this a secret for very long, and you still let yourself take the fall just to keep us from finding out.”

“I’m not in the business of blabbing other people’s stuff,” Tony said, turning back to the computer. 

“Yeah… but we missed you,” Bruce said. 

Tony glanced over his shoulder. “What?”

“We missed you. Everybody missed you. I missed you.”

“I’m not sure I believe that.”

“Well, believe it,” Bruce said, stepping closer. “I’ve… gotten pretty used to having you around. It’s way too quiet when you’re not.”

“So you missed my big mouth?”

“Other parts of you, too,” he admitted. 

Tony rolled his chair back to face Bruce. “Yeah? Anybody else miss me?”

Bruce’s face flushed. “You mean…”

“You know what I mean.”  
“I don’t know if the other guy really misses people… he just knows they’re not there and he’s mad because he doesn’t understand why.”

“What’s he thinking right now?”

Bruce’s cheeks turned even redder, and his eyes dropped. “You don’t want to know.”

“Oh, I’m pretty sure I do,” Tony said, and suddenly Bruce realized he was much closer than he’d been a minute ago. “Is he thinking dirty things?”

Bruce cleared his throat. “He… umm… would really like us to be fucking you through a wall right now.”

Tony grinned. “He would, huh. What about you?”

“I… my thoughts were kind of along the same lines, except with a little less violence.”

When Tony didn’t answer him, he looked up and found the intense dark eyes staring back at him with an expression that was half expectation and half wariness. He slowly raised a hand and let it slide down the front of Tony’s shirt, over the hard ridge of the arc reactor, and down to the softness of his stomach. Tony inhaled sharply, and his eyes drifted closed.

“Do you want…”

“It’s been a pretty boring week,” Tony murmured. 

“We can go up to my room…”

“Uh-uh. Right here.”

“Where?”

“Wherever,” Tony said, reaching out and hooking his fingers into the waistband of Bruce’s pants. 

“They’re waiting for us…”

“They’ll figure it out.”

 

 

Natasha sighed and reached for another handful of popcorn. “Where the hell is everybody?”

“Bruce went to get Tony…” Steve said, and the slightly displeased expression on his face finished the suggestion as to what might have delayed them. 

“Hell. Whose idea was that?”

“He was ignoring JARVIS, so Bruce offered to go,” Thor said. “I don’t think they are very concerned about missing the movie… we’ve seen this one several times.”

“We’ve seen them ALL several times,” she said. “Even the bad ones.”

“Especially the bad ones,” Steve added. 

“Maybe that’s why Clint’s pissing around so long getting a shower,” Natasha said. “JARVIS? Is Clint out of the shower yet?”

“Ma’am, Agent Barton finished showering and dressing approximately twelve minutes ago.”

“Then where is he? Tell him to get up here.”

“Agent Barton is not currently appearing on any of the building cameras.”

All three of them froze. 

“Why not?” Steve asked. 

“I don’t know, Captain.”

Thor frowned. “He couldn’t have departed the building without the cameras seeing him, could he?” 

“Not if he left through the doors, sir, but Agent Barton tends to prefer to use alternative means of moving around the building…”

“Shit,” Natasha muttered, looking around. “If he left through the ventilation system, he’s had plenty of time to be gone in too many directions for us to look for him. Thor, did he say anything about…”

“No… he only said he wished to have a shower and then he would join us. I shouldn’t have left him…”

“It’s not your fault. I’m the one who decided the protocols didn’t need to be in place anymore once we got Loki and his stuff out of his head.”

“Maybe he just wanted to go for a walk and get some fresh air and think about things,” Steve said. “I do it all the time.”

“Yeah, but why wouldn’t he tell us? He had to know we’d…”

“Because if he’d told you, you wouldn’t have let him go,” Steve said. 

“I… shit,” Natasha sighed. “I’m just trying to keep him safe. Is that so horrible?”

“No,” Steve said. “But that doesn’t mean he’s going to appreciate it. Do we have any reason to assume that he’s in any kind of danger?”

“No,” she admitted. “He can take care of anything he’s likely to run into walking around the neighborhood, and we don’t have any reason to think he has any intent to hurt himself or let himself get hurt.”

“Something tells me we won’t find him if he doesn’t wish to be found,” Thor said. 

She smiled ruefully. “That’s what he’s trained for.”

“Then we shall not worry until we have reason to.”

She shook her head. “You’re worried too.”

“Perhaps. Does it matter? What would you have us do?”

She flopped back down on the couch. “Give me the damn popcorn. And put on a different movie. This one sucks. And if he’s not back by tomorrow morning, we’re going looking for him.”

“Fair enough,” Steve said. 

“I must agree with Natasha’s assessment,” Thor said. 

“What, that if Clint’s not…”

“No… that this movie sucks.”

 

 

There wasn’t much happening this early in the evening on the New York streets that even caught Clint’s notice, just the ever-present traffic and the people hopping in and out of taxis and the restaurants starting to fill up as the dinner crowds began to arrive. The air against his bare arms was cold, and almost everyone else had a coat on, but to him the chill was good, distracting him from his thoughts, keeping his pace brisk to stay warm. 

No one paid any attention to him as he walked, except to sidestep around him without a glance. He had a flash of memory of his mother saying that she would never live in a city because no one in the city knows or cares about anybody else, and then wondered if it was really a memory or just one of the scraps his mind had assembled out of the jumble of words and faces that had been his childhood. Not that it mattered; he’d come out here just for the anonymity, because it felt so good to be invisible and unseen after the constant watchfulness of the team and ever-present JARVIS. A few hours out here, especially after dark, was usually enough to put his head back together and shake off the feeling of being trapped, or being someone’s science experiment. 

For a moment the smell of burning rubber mingled with the ordinary smells of a city street, but then it was stronger, strong enough to make his eyes water, and this had happened enough times now for him to know what it meant. He veered toward an alley between the nearest two buildings, hoping to at least be out of sight when it happened… his invisibility wouldn’t last if he had a seizure in the middle of the sidewalk, and people might ask questions, or recognize him. 

The smell was stronger and his hands and feet seemed weirdly large, unwieldy, and unwilling to obey him as he stumbled into the shadows. He slumped against a wall, hoping this one wouldn’t be too bad. 

The man that scrambled out from under his feet had a scruffy beard and a dirty baseball cap and a wild look in his eyes, and Clint had just long enough to think that if he was trying to sleep off the day’s abuses in his favorite alley and some weirdo came staggering along and tried to say things that didn’t come out as word and lurched at him, he’d probably protect himself too. He felt a sharp pain just above his belt and registered that it probably wasn’t a good thing before the seizure that had been brewing in a corner of his brain spilled out and washed over him and he couldn’t think about anything anymore. 

 

 

No one said much the next morning, although it was fairly clear that Natasha had been out walking the streets all night and was half-dozing on the couch, still in the same clothes from the day before. Thor lurked protectively around the living room and muttered things at Tony and Bruce when they were too loud getting off the elevator. Steve had taken Natasha’s place walking around, but not with much optimism; if Clint didn’t want to be found, they weren’t going to find him, at least not that easily. 

“You said you were going to make phone calls,” Thor said, his voice low as he approached Tony and Bruce. 

“We did,” Bruce said. “Well, I did. Tony’s a little too well-known to be waving around S.H.I.E.L.D. credentials and pretending he’s allowed to be asking questions he’s not.”

“Have you learned anything?” Thor asked. 

“I was hoping I wouldn’t,” Bruce said. “I was calling hospitals. And one of them has a John Doe that meets Clint’s description…”

“We’re not looking for John Doe,” Thor interrupted irritably. 

“They’ve got a guy whose name they don’t know because he came in unconscious,” Tony explained.

Natasha was wide awake. “What? What happened to him? Are you sure it’s Clint?”

“Matches the description pretty much exactly,” Bruce said. “Someone brought him in last night with a stab wound to the abdomen… had to take him into emergency surgery to stop some bleeding, but they said he’s stable now and should be fine.”

“Someone brought him in with a stab wound?” she repeated. “Does that sound bizarre to anyone else?”

“If we go down there and talk to them, maybe you can pull some spy stuff and get a look at the video of when he came in,” Bruce said. “They’re expecting us… they’d like to get an ID on him if it is Clint, since apparently he’s conscious but won’t tell them anything.”

“Yup… it’s Clint,” she sighed. “Let’s go. I’ll drive.”

 

 

Clint had gotten used to coming out of a seizure disoriented and not knowing how he got where he was, but this was worse than usual. At least he didn’t usually wake up in a completely unfamiliar place with IV lines in his arm and an oxygen mask on his face and tubes in uncomfortable places he didn’t want to have them, with monitors tracing colored lines across the screen above his head and voices talking in the hall outside the door. He shifted, realizing he wasn’t restrained, but that he definitely did feel like shit, and that there was a distinctly unpleasant sharp pain in his abdomen. He also recognized the fuzziness of pain medication creeping across the edges of his thoughts, making it hard to focus. White walls. White sheets. White gown tied in the back. Metal rails on the bed. Definitely hospital. He had no idea why, but he realized that was probably because of the seizure too; he’d noticed that the worse ones tended to wipe out a chunk of memory for several hours before the actual event. He vaguely remembered going for a walk. Nothing else. 

He turned his head to survey the room again, and this time the chair that he was pretty sure had been empty a moment ago was occupied. 

In the dim light, it took a moment for Clint to register the slender figure, the sharp features, the bright eyes, the sleek black hair. 

“Hello, Agent Barton.”

Clint reached up to pull the oxygen mask off his face, wondering why that small motion seemed so exhausting. 

“What are you doing here?”

“Do you even know what you’re doing here?”

“No. I guess that might be a good start.”

Loki chuckled. “You seem to have run into some trouble.”

“What…”

He reached down and felt the bandages over the line of stitches across his stomach. 

“You were bleeding,” Loki said. “You want to know why I’m here? I brought you here. How you managed to go and have someone stab you I’m not certain, but…”

“How did you know…”

“I watch you,” he said, his smile fading. “Not always. You may not realize it, but my mother has blocked the tower from my view so that I could not pry into your business, or my brother’s. I can only see you when you leave…”

“You’ve been watching me?”

Loki sighed. “I don’t think I have time to answer your questions, little Hawk. I heard the nurses talking, and apparently your friends have learned that you’re here and they are on their way.”

Clint’s eyes widened. “Shit. No. They can’t… if S.H.I.E.L.D. finds out I was here… after everything else... I’m going to get dragged in for testing and… that’ll be the end. Of all of it. I’ve got to get out of here.”

“I don’t think you have the strength to walk across the room.”

“Then get me out of here. I know you can,” Clint demanded. 

“You wish me to take you back to your team?”

“No. Just… take me somewhere. I have to figure out… things. If the team tries to hide this from S.H.I.E.L.D. they’re all going to be fucked.”

“You trust me, of all people, to take you away from here? To wherever I wish?”

Clint studied him for a moment, then nodded. “If you wanted me dead, I’d already be dead. So whatever you want, you’re not going to get it unless you get me the fuck out of here. If you want to… take… whatever you want…”

Loki frowned. “Little Hawk, I have had time to think on many things. I swear to you, for whatever a trickster’s word is worth, that I will never touch you or intrude upon you without your consent again.”

“That’ll have to do,” Clint said. “Get me out of here. Please.”

Loki stood up and reached out to grasp Clint’s hand. “Very well. Brace yourself. I don’t know how humans like traveling this way.”

 

 

Natasha and Bruce arrived on the surgical recovery ward just in time to hear alarms going off in the nurses’ station, and to see several figures in scrubs racing toward one of the rooms. 

“Want to bet ten bucks that’s Clint’s room?” Natasha asked. 

“Twenty.”

They walked into a room full of loudly beeping monitors, confused hospital staff, and an empty bed. 

“What the hell…”

“He was just here…”

“All his tubes are still here! His IV line is right there!”

“You can’t just disappear out of a hospital bed…”

“Wasn’t this guy still recovering from surgery? He didn’t just pull those tubes out and walk out of here…”

Natasha shook her head and looked over at Bruce. 

“Clint pull this on his own?” Bruce asked. 

“I don’t think so. They had him hooked up to a heart monitor. The alarm started sounding as soon as it stopped registering a heartbeat. So he’d have had to get everything else off without them noticing, then pull the heart monitor and get out the door without anyone seeing him in the middle of everyone running in here.”

“He didn’t just vanish out of his bed,” Bruce said. “Clint’s good, but he’s not that good.”

“No,” she said quietly. “So who do we know who has the ability to make someone vanish out of a hospital bed, and who also might have a particular interest in Clint?”

“Are you thinking we made a really bad decision when we decided to let Loki walk?”

“Maybe,” she murmured. “But if he’s the one who brought Clint in here last night instead of letting him bleed to death, maybe not. And look at that bed… do you see any signs of a struggle, or Clint trying to signal anyone that he was in trouble?”

Bruce shook his head. “You think Loki took him somewhere… and he went willingly? That’s assuming an awful lot. He could have been unconscious…”

“You think it’s coincidence that he disappeared as we were walking in the door?” Natasha asked. 

“You think Clint ASKED Loki to take him somewhere, before we could get here? Why?”

“Because he’d rather try his luck with Loki than let S.H.I.E.L.D. find out how he ended up in here.”

“Then he needs to have his head examined,” Bruce muttered. 

“Tony made an appointment for them to do that tomorrow,” Natasha said. “Something tells me he’s going to have to reschedule.”

“I just can’t understand how he’d…”

“S.H.I.E.L.D. is Clint’s life,” she said. “Well, it was. Now the team… but Fury will yank him from the team if he finds out he’s neurologically compromised. This is his entire life. He doesn’t have anything else. If they find out before we get this fixed, they’ll take everything from him.”

“Shit,” Bruce sighed. “Doesn’t Fury know we’d all quit before we let them pull Clint off our team?”

“Fury knows,” she said. “Problem is… Clint doesn’t.”

 

.  
.  
.


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clint attempts to figure out what Loki is up to, but the answers he gets are mostly just confusing. The team attempts to figure out what Loki is up to, with even less success than Clint.   
> .  
> .  
> .

Clint had no idea what happened between the hospital room and waking up some time later to a crackling sound and the smell of smoke. Instinct sent alarm signals to his brain, jerking him abruptly back to full awareness, but trying to sit up sent a sharp stab of pain through his bandaged abdomen. He slumped back and turned to face the fireplace, where a bright blaze was burning. Unable to see anything but shadows beyond the glow of the fire, he put his hands out and found rough but thick, warm blankets laid out underneath him and over him, and hard wooden floor beneath that. He listened, trying to determine the size of the space by the echoes of the cracks from the burning wood, but it was hard to focus with the narcotics from the hospital still muddying his thoughts. 

For a moment he wondered if he had even really been in the hospital, or if any of the things between the last seizure and now had actually happened, or if this was actually happening. He ran his fingers over the bandages, over the sore spot where the IV line had been, felt the rawness in his throat that he knew from unfortunate past experiences was from being intubated for surgery. 

A door opened, letting gray daylight spill in and giving Clint a glimpse of his surroundings. He saw plain wooden walls adorned with shadowy outlines of mounted deer heads, two sets of small metal bunk beds against one wall and a small kitchen area with cheap cabinets and what appeared to be a wood-burning stove. Then a figure stepped in, and the door closed. Clint could hear the person setting things down on the counter, probably cans, from the dull metallic thud. 

“Are you awake, Agent Barton?”

Loki. 

He considered for a moment before answering; if Loki intended to do him any harm, he certainly could have done it while he was unconscious. And if he wanted to save the torment for when Clint was awake and would suffer more, pretending he was still out was only going to delay it. 

“Yeah. I’m awake.”

“Excellent. How do you feel?”

“Sore. And really confused.”

“Understandable.”

A match flared, and then the small flame jumped to the wick of an oil lamp. Loki slid the glass back down to protect the flickering light and walked toward him, setting the lamp down on a low table and sitting down on a threadbare sofa, looking over Clint toward the fire. 

“Are you warm enough?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t object to the cold… I suppose it’s in my nature… but I’ve been trying to make it warm enough for a human to be comfortable. It’s quite cold outside, and the snow is rather deep.”

“Wait… snow? There wasn’t snow in New York. Where are we? What is this place? Where did you take me?”

Loki looked around. “I believe it’s a hunting cabin. A rather neglected one. I’ve been using it, here and there, and when I first found it there was a family of rather odd creatures living here.”

Wondering if he was on a different planet, Clint frowned. “Odd creatures?”

Loki held his hands apart. “Perhaps this long. With a large bushy tail and a masked face… and a very bad temper.”

Clint snorted. “Raccoons.”

“They had torn the boards off one of the windows. I evicted them and boarded it back up. There wasn’t much food here that they hadn’t destroyed, but there’s a town some distance away and I’ve been stopping into various houses and shops occasionally to procure a few things while the owners were away.”

“This is where you’ve been hiding out since we let you go?”

“One of the places,” Loki said. “It hasn’t been safe to stay anywhere for very long, but it seems that Thanos has become occupied with other things and lost interest in me.”

“Okay…” Clint said, wincing at the pain that was increasingly breaking through the narcotic haze and cutting into him with each breath. “But that doesn’t explain any of the rest of it.”

Loki smiled slightly. “No, it doesn’t. I don’t know what happened to you… I came to look in on you and found you in an alley, bleeding. You were awake, but not coherent…”

“Post-ictal state,” Clint said. 

Loki raised an eyebrow. “What?”

“Post-seizure. Confusion, memory loss. I’m getting to know it pretty well.”

“I thought…”

“Yeah. So did we. It’s not fixed. Whatever you and your fucking cube did, it messed something up… and if anyone finds out about it… I won’t be an Avenger. I won’t be an agent. I won’t even be allowed to drive a fucking car anymore, much less fly a Quinjet. I’ll be…”

He ran out of breath and let his head fall back, giving into the intense exhaustion. 

“I never meant to…”

“No. You were just going to kill me when you were done with me, and then it wouldn’t have been a problem.”

Loki sighed. “You’re right… that was, at one point, my plan. But all of my plans went awry, and none of them more than my plans for you, Agent Barton.”

“Why? Because I lived? Because I fucked up your world domination thing?”

“Because I did not realize the consequences of intruding into someone else’s mind,” Loki said. “Thanos gave me the ability. He neglected to give detailed instructions.”

“So what?” Clint asked. “You didn’t think I’d be able to fight back when you tried to…”

“I let you fight back,” Loki said quietly. 

“Why?”

Loki shrugged. “You only know me as evil. I have… other sides. I had no wish to take you against your will, Agent Barton. Yes, I… wanted you. But I wanted you to be strong, to be fighting, to be…”

“I remember,” Clint said. “Some of it, anyway. It’s all… confused. But…”

“You may not believe it, but much of that time is strange and confused for me as well,” Loki said. “I did not expect the effect the Tesseract would have on me, that it would warp my thoughts, make things seem clear and simple, make it seem like what I was doing was right and wise and good…”

“You knew what you were doing,” Clint interrupted. 

“I did,” Loki admitted. “But I… do you know what is between the worlds, Agent Barton? Between Asgard and your world, between all the worlds? There is a void. A great, silent nothing. An endless, timeless emptiness. Did my brother tell you of the battle between us, where I was cast into that void?”

“You jumped,” Clint said. 

Loki contemplated for a moment. “Perhaps I did. But… there is no time, in that place. There is no memory. There is only the pain of loss, of isolation, of longing for the things you once had… forever, with no end.”

“And that’s where Thanos found you,” Clint realized. 

Loki nodded slowly. “He gave me one of the Infinity Stones, showed me how to use the Tesseract to escape from the void and to arrive in this world. And he showed me how it could be, if I ruled this world, how my brother, my father would finally have to see…”

He stopped abruptly and stood up, walking toward the kitchen. 

“You should eat something.”

“I don’t know if I can… could drink something. Maybe soup?”

“That can be arranged,” Loki said. “I had a proper fire in the stove earlier to boil some water, so it should only take a few minutes to have it burning again. I don’t know what some of these things in these cans are…”

“As long as it’s edible,” Clint said, letting himself slump back against the blankets and feeling the warmth from the fire against the side of his face. 

“I assume it should be… I did avoid the cans that had pictures of cats and dogs on them. I assumed those were food for cats and dogs, not food made out of cats and dogs, since the cans of this ‘corned beef’ substance don’t have pictures of cows on them…”

“Why are you doing this?”

Loki stopped talking and glanced over his shoulder at Clint. “Must we have this discussion now?”

“I guess that’s up to you, since I don’t have much of a choice in the matter. Will you at least tell me why you were watching me?”

Loki went back to rummaging through the stack of cans. “Midgard was a place Thanos seemed less likely to look for me…”

“I didn’t ask why you were on Earth. I asked why you were watching me.”

Loki selected a can and found the can opener in one of the drawers, poked the fire in the stove, and eventually looked back to Clint. 

“I told you… I didn’t know what the power of the Infinity Stones would do to a mortal. I didn’t even know what they would do to me. I knew I had the power to control human minds. I didn’t know… there would be consequences.”

“For the human, or for you?”

“I wasn’t thinking much about the humans in question at that point,” Loki said. “But with hindsight, I wish I had known what it would do to both of us.”

“Yeah, well… it doesn’t seem to have done you any harm,” Clint muttered. “Whatever trouble you’re in is your own fault.”

“It had one effect I did not expect,” he said, pouring the contents of the can into a pot. 

“What was that?”

“I… even before it mattered to me whether you could get rid of the effects of my presence, I realized I… could not get rid of the effects of yours.”

“What effects? I…”

Loki’s eyes were strangely bright in the dim lamplight. “I should have been able to forget about you. I could not. I had no reason to care about the damage I had done to an ordinary mortal. I did anyway. I had no reason to think about you. I could not stop.”

“You think that’s from the cube?” Clint asked. 

Loki shrugged. “It’s never happened before.”

Clint thought about that for a moment and decided that he wasn’t sure whether he wanted any more answers for the moment, not until he’d had time to consider the questions carefully first. Besides, the effort of talking had pulled the pain in his abdomen out from beneath the blanket of narcotics and brought it out in full stabbing force, and he suddenly felt extremely weary. 

“Rest,” Loki said. “There will be food when you wake.”

Clint let his eyes drift closed, dimly realizing that he was allowing himself to sleep peacefully in the same room as the enemy that had taken over his mind, sent him on suicide missions, intended more than once to kill him, and caused the damage in his head that had ended him up here. He knew he should probably be more concerned about that than he was, but for the moment, it didn’t seem to matter. 

 

 

 

Natasha propped her elbows on the conference room table and rested her chin in her hands. 

“So there’s no way we can track Loki.”

“Not any way I know about,” Tony said, fiddling with something on his laptop. 

“JARVIS picked him up twice before,” she said. “What was he detecting?”

“JARVIS?” Tony asked. 

“Sir, Loki radiates a rather unique type of energy that does not correspond to anything I am familiar with. I suspect it is a form of energy unique to Asgard, as the closest match I can find to it is the similar energy pattern that Thor emits.”

Thor looked up, surprised. “I do?”

“It is similar to Loki’s but quite distinct when they are both compared.”

“Well, if Loki has a unique energy pattern, can’t we try to track it?” Steve asked. 

“I don’t think that would be effective, Captain,” JARVIS replied. 

“Why not?”

“Because even with the extremely sensitive instruments I have direct access to, I am only able to track Thor’s particular energy pattern within approximately a two-kilometer radius of the building, after which it can no longer be detected. I have not had as many opportunities to track and compare the radius within which I can detect Loki’s signature, but from the data I do have it appears to be within a similar radius.”

“Fuck,” Natasha muttered. “So we could track him, if we had sensors within a two-kilometer radius of everywhere on the planet.”

“You’re assuming they’re still on this planet,” Bruce said. 

Natasha raised her head. “Can he do that? Would Clint survive it?”

“Mortals have been transported from Midgard to other worlds before and survived, but it isn’t easy for them,” Thor said. “And yes, Loki can do that, if he wished to, although it would be very unwise of him to attempt it with a mortal who was already injured and weakened.”

“You think Loki would care about that?” Tony asked. 

“That depends on why he took Clint in the first place,” Bruce pointed out. “And what he was doing here at all. I mean, Loki brought him to the hospital with a stab wound. I know he’s nuts, but I’m not seeing even any kind of Loki-nuts logic in stabbing him and then taking him to a hospital to keep him from dying from it. Not his style.”

Thor shook his head grimly. “It is not. If Loki wished to inflict pain on Clint he would have taken him somewhere private to do it, and he would have been very careful not to inflict life-threatening injuries… until he was finished playing.”

“So he ended up injured somehow… why would Loki take him to the hospital?” Natasha asked. 

“Loki doesn’t want him to die,” Bruce said, shrugging. “Seems like the only reason I can think of.”

“But Loki was going to kill Clint himself. He would have, if we hadn’t stopped him.”

“Maybe something’s different,” Bruce said.

“You don’t seem very concerned, considering that Clint’s badly injured and he’s in the hands of a psychotic compulsive liar with supernatural powers and a habit of destroying just about everything,” Natasha snapped. 

“I’m concerned,” Bruce said. “But I’m not going to jump to conclusions. First of all, there’s no point, and second of all, it might be worse for Clint if we do. You saw that hospital room. Wherever Clint went, he went without a fight. And if Clint didn’t want to go, he’d have been fighting, stab wound or no stab wound. The nurses said he was alert and oriented when they checked in on him… he didn’t go quietly unless he wanted to.”

“So you think it’s a good idea for him to be off somewhere with Loki?” Tony said, frowning. 

“No. I think it’s a terrible idea. But I think it was Clint’s idea.”

“He’s not thinking clearly,” Natasha said. “We have to get him back.”

“I don’t see how,” Steve said. “Clint has an implanted tracking chip, right? All S.H.I.E.L.D. agents do, from what I was told. But it takes a special command from the director to activate the chip, because it could blow an agent’s cover or lead their enemies right to them. So if we want the chip activated, we’d have to go to Fury, and I think Clint’s made it pretty clear he doesn’t want S.H.I.E.L.D. involved in any of this.”

“If you took off and we had a good reason to believe you didn’t want to be found, would you want us to go to Fury and ask him to activate your chip?” Tony asked. 

Natasha scowled. “I removed mine. Want to see the scar? And for that matter, Clint removed his, too. Fury bitched, but there wasn’t much he could do about it.”

“So if a guy who’s so determined to get himself in and out of his own trouble that he’d cut a tracking device out of his body goes missing, my guess would be you’re not going to find him unless he wants to be found,” Bruce said. 

“I can’t just sit back and let Loki…”

“You don’t know what Loki’s going to do,” Bruce said. “But Clint’s smart, and he knows how to get himself out of messes… and aren’t you the one who insists that both of you work better if other people don’t show up and fuck up your plans?”

She sighed. “Yes. But I mostly meant me.”

“You know Clint can handle himself.”

“Yeah. He can.”

“So…” Bruce said, holding out his hands, “we trust him to handle this.”

“Particularly since we don’t have a choice,” Tony added. 

“You’re so helpful,” Bruce muttered, glaring at him. 

“What? We don’t!”

“Just stop talking now, okay?”

“Fine. Everybody hates when I’m right anyway.”


	15. Chapter 15

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Loki has found that regret isn't a feeling he likes very much. Clint doesn't have any answers for him, but Loki might have some unexpected ones for Clint.   
> .  
> .  
> .

Clint woke to the crackling of the fire and the sound of wind battering the walls of the little cabin. He rubbed his face and looked around, but he seemed to be alone. 

“Hello?” he called. 

“Agent Barton,” Loki said, dropping out of what appeared to be a small loft. “I found some more blankets up here, but it appears that animals have made nests of most of them…”

“I’m warm enough.”

Loki returned to the sofa and sat down, a bowl of soup in his hands, watching with narrowed eyes as Clint tried to prop himself up without worsening the pain in his abdomen. After a moment, Loki set down the bowl and reached for him, but Clint slapped his hand away. 

“Fuck off. I didn’t say you could touch me.”

“I was trying to help.”

Clint managed to get himself into something like a seated position, although he had to lean against the arm of the sofa to keep himself upright. He reached for the bowl of soup, but to his frustration could not hide the unsteadiness of his hands. 

“You lost a considerable amount of blood,” Loki said, handing him the bowl and steadying it with one hand underneath it. “You will need time to recover.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Clint muttered, raising the bowl to his lips. 

“I would think it would matter quite a bit.”

“It doesn’t matter because even if I heal up from this, the other thing isn’t going away. The things you broke in my head. That’s not going away. You don’t get that? Everything I’ve spent my whole life working for is over. It’s all gone. It would’ve been better if you’d just killed me.”

Loki cocked his head curiously. “If I had killed you, would I still be troubled by thoughts of you?”

“Fuck if I know. I don’t know why you’re troubled by thoughts of me at all. You didn’t give a shit about doing what you did to me. And you didn’t give a shit about doing horrible things to me to try to get your Tesseract energy back…”

“I did,” Loki said quietly. 

“Yeah. That’s why you used me as a punching bag and messed with my head and…”

“I didn’t…”

“Don’t tell me you didn’t want to. You got a kick out of it. Enjoyed it. I know you did.”

Loki shrugged. “At first. But then… it felt… wrong, to enjoy it. I felt wrong, for enjoying it. And then I didn’t enjoy it anymore. And that isn’t how… how I should be. The feeling of doing something wrong is a strange one for me.”

“Glad I could contribute to you developing some kind of a conscience,” Clint said bitterly, staring into his soup. 

Loki sighed. “I’m failing to explain myself. It’s rare that words fail me.”

“Maybe that’s because you’re trying to tell the truth and you’re not used to it.”

“No…” Loki said. “I am not. But I am making the attempt.”

“Why?”

“Because… I need to understand.”

“What do you need to understand?” Clint demanded. “You took over my head and you used me and you broke me, and now you want to sit here and have a chit-chat about what’s going on in your head about me and how you don’t like it? I didn’t get into your head and…”

“You did get into my head!” Loki snapped. “I don’t know how. It shouldn’t… that’s not how it’s supposed to work.”

“No. You’re supposed to just be able to walk away.”

“None of the others…”

“What? None of them got into your head? Because they didn’t fight back?”

Loki scowled. “I told you. I don’t know. But I want to know how to get you out of my head.”

“Tough shit,” Clint muttered. “I have to live with what you did to me for the rest of my life. It’s only fair you get to live with what you did to me for the rest of yours.”

“It is intolerable,” Loki said. 

“You’re fucking intolerable,” Clint shot back. “Leave me alone. I don’t want to hear any more of your bullshit about how hard this is for you when you don’t have to…”

“At least you have friends by your side,” Loki said, in a low voice. 

“You could have had your brother by your side forever if you hadn’t tried to kill him a couple of times.”

“I know. I… regret what I did to him. I regret what I did to you. And that’s what I don’t understand. Regret is… not something I’m accustomed to. It doesn’t sit easily on my shoulders.”

“It’s not supposed to,” Clint said. “It’s supposed to feel shitty. It’s what makes people want to be better people. It’s what makes them want to fix the things they did wrong.”

“Perhaps I wish to fix the things I did wrong,” Loki said, looking down at him. “Perhaps I wish to be a better person.”

Clint looked back at him, looking for deception, sarcasm, anything readable in those bright eyes, but he saw nothing he could understand, nothing behind the shield Loki had worn for so long. Clint recognized that, at least, though. The shield. He’d seen it in Natasha’s eyes. She’d seen it in his. You wore it when you couldn’t afford to let other people see what was behind it, because they might use it to break you. 

“You don’t give a shit about any of that. Being a better person.”

“I didn’t think I did. But why have I been driven to come back here and to watch for you, to see that you were well and that you were with your friends? Why do I keep needing to see you?”

“You’re nuts?” Clint suggested. 

Loki gave him a sharp look. “I have always been thought mad. It doesn’t concern me. But this does. I don’t understand…”

Clint was going to interrupt him, but before he got a chance, the acrid burning smell hit him, and the strange sensation in his limbs, and the sense of the world going sideways. 

“Take the bowl,” he forced out. 

“You should…”

“Take it. I’m going to drop it.”

Puzzled, Loki reached out and took the bowl from Clint’s shaking hands, and although he wouldn’t remember it later, for a moment he found himself looking up at Loki’s face and saw something he didn’t expect, didn’t have a name for, and he wondered if Loki even knew what to call it. He felt hands on his face, trying to steady him, and then nothing else. 

 

 

 

It must not have been a bad one, because when he began to realize where he was and what had happened, he was on his back on the floor, and Loki was kneeling over him, still holding the soup bowl with one hand while the other rested on Clint’s chest. 

“What was that?”

Clint took a deep breath and put the words together in his head carefully, knowing they might come out as incoherent nonsense otherwise. 

“That’s what you did to me.”

“That… how often does it happen?”

“Every day. Sometimes more than once. And there’s smaller ones… they only last half a minute, but they happen… a lot.”

“Every day? That happens?”

Clint nodded and tried to prop himself up on his elbows, but the pain under the bandage made him slump back down. 

“Yeah. Probably looks bad, huh? I mean, I have no idea what’s happening when it’s going on. But I know I come back with bruises I don’t remember getting, and… I have to hide them. I get a little bit of warning… just enough. But it’s getting harder to hide them, and now the team knows, and I think they’re just getting worse…”

Loki’s hand on his face felt so blissfully cool that he had to force himself not to turn his cheek into the touch; he hadn’t realized how hot he was.

“You don’t look well.”

“Yeah. I don’t feel great. That’s how it is… after. It takes a little while…”

“I would like to look at your wound.”

Clint gave him a sharp look. “What for? You don’t know anything about…”

“I know enough to know if it looks better or worse,” Loki said. 

“No,” Clint insisted, trying to squirm away. Loki’s hand on his face was bad enough; he couldn’t process the thought of having those hands on his soft, exposed belly, so close to other vulnerable places, so close to…

“I won’t hurt you…”

“Don’t touch me.”

“Then let me take you back to a hospital.”

“No.”

“What if I insist?”

“You promised you’d never do anything without my consent again.”

Loki sat back, muttering curses. “What if you’re ill? What if you die?”

“Might as well,” Clint muttered, turning his head away. “Everything’s gone anyway. What you just saw… that’s the life I get to live now. And I know they’ve got medications that can make them happen less often but those fuck you up too, and either way… there’s no more Agent Barton. There’s no more Hawkeye. You can’t be a superhero if you’re drugged up and out of it or if your brain randomly decides to check out for a few minutes in the middle of a fight. Agent Barton’s already dead. Hawkeye’s already dead. You killed him. So fuck off and leave me alone.”

“Your friends… somehow, I think they would prefer you alive even if you aren’t able to be Agent Barton anymore,” Loki said quietly. 

“So they can feel bad for me and use me being broken as the thing that holds the team together when there’s no other reason they even tolerate each other.”

Loki crossed his arms. “You expect me to sit here and watch you die?”

“That or you can just go away.”

“That’s not…”

“Since when do you give a shit about what’s right or wrong?” Clint demanded. 

Loki looked away, and for a moment Clint thought he wasn’t going to answer him. 

“Since I met you. And I don’t like it. But it doesn’t seem to be going away. Let me at least look at your wound… please.”

Clint shuddered, but arguing with Loki about it would just be admitting another weakness he could exploit if he chose to. If the thought of Loki’s hands on him like that was going to confuse and panic him, he didn’t need Loki to know it. 

“Fine. Whatever.”

Loki pulled the blankets away, and Clint tried to take his mind somewhere else, but he couldn’t help but notice that Loki carefully uncovered only as much as he had to in order to look at the wound, although he could have stripped him bare. 

“There is bleeding and… the bandages look very unpleasant. I’m going to remove them. There’s a first aid kit in the cabinets that has some similar material I can use to replace them.”

“I wish you’d just leave it alone.”

“Please don’t make me do that.”

Clint knew he could insist, and that he could make the cool hands gently stroking over his stomach go away. The words, though, didn’t seem to want to come out. So he stayed still and tried not to think about it and tried to ignore the pain as Loki pulled away the old bandages, cleaned the wound as well as he could, and covered it with fresh gauze.

“I think you need to go back to a hospital,” he said, sitting back. “I may not be human but I know a wound that looks like that needs the care of a healer. It will make you…”

“I know,” Clint snapped. “Been there before. Trust me. I told you. I’m not going anywhere.”

“Let me take you back to your friends.”

“So I can be their science experiment? No.”

“You wish to just lay here in this place and slowly die?”

“Yup.”

Loki scowled. “These are not the words of the Hawk I knew.”

“You killed that Hawk,” Clint murmured, turning away as much as he could. “You killed him. And what’s left isn’t worth saving. So leave me alone. You gave me your word you wouldn’t do anything without my permission.”

“I could break my word. It’s what I usually do.”

“Then go ahead. Do whatever you want. You’ve done enough damage… you want to do more? It doesn’t matter. Fuck things up more. Make it worse. I don’t care. I don’t have anything else to lose.”

“You have people who love you,” Loki said, his voice so low that Clint barely heard him. “I would give up everything I have, everything I ever had, to have that back.”

“Can’t go back,” Clint said. “You should know that by now. We can’t fix the damage we do. And I’ve done enough. Even before you came along, I’d done enough damage in the world. No reason to go back and do anymore. It can’t be undone. You don’t… those things never stop being part of you. They never go away.”

“No,” Loki murmured. “But somehow, you have found friends who have seen the truth of you and stayed by your side.”

“I’m useless to them now. Worse than useless… as long as they try to cover for me, I’m dangerous. The best thing I can do for them is go away.”

“I think they would disagree.”

“They’ll understand, eventually,” he said, resting his head on his arm. “They’ll forget me, eventually. Everyone always does.”

“I…”

“Go away.”

There was a long moment of silence, and then he heard Loki’s footsteps moving across the wooden floor, away from him, and he closed his eyes and let the deep exhaustion that came after a seizure pull him down. 

 

 

He woke to voices, and to a soft golden light in the cabin that didn’t come from the dying fire. Something told him to keep still, but he listened. 

“I should not be here,” the female voice said, quietly but with authority and strength behind it. 

“I need your help.”

“Loki, I cannot help you. You know that.”

“Not for me. I need you to help someone else. I cannot undo the harm I’ve done… I need you to help me.”

“What difference does it make, Loki?” she asked, gently. “Redeeming one life, after all the lives you’ve destroyed? You called me here just for this?”

“He… please. He deserves another chance to live.”

“What has he done to earn this chance?” she asked. 

“He spared my life. After what I did to him. He chose to set me free, instead of keeping me a prisoner for Thanos to come and claim at his leisure. He gave me a fighting chance. I wish to give him the same.”

“Second chances are not ours to grant, Loki.”

“Please. All I ask is that you undo the damage I did to him. Nothing else.”

“I cannot make him forget what you did, Loki, and even if I could, I would not. Your deeds deserve to be remembered. You do know that even if I heal him, he will still hate you?”

“I know,” Loki said, and the strange tightness in his voice twisted something in Clint’s throat. “He has every reason to. But…”

“No matter how many of your cruel deeds I might try to undo, Loki, you can never come back.”

“I know. But… he can. He has people who love him. They trust him. They would mourn him. He can go back. If I can’t, at least let him…”

“Shh…” the woman said softly, and Clint was glad, because he didn’t think he could hear another moment of Loki’s voice on the edge of breaking. 

“Please, mother.”

“I will do as you ask,” she said, and Clint realized that there were very soft footsteps approaching him, and the golden glow lit the floor around him and cast competing shadows that flickered over the ones from the fire. He rolled over and looked up to find a tall, graceful woman in gold robes, her long hair elaborately wrapped around her head, her face solemn and wise and gentle and somehow both ancient and ageless. 

“You heard my son’s words,” she said. 

Clint nodded. 

“Do you wish to go back?”

“Only if I can still fight. Only if I can still be who I was.”

“Would your friends still love you even if you couldn’t?”

There was no lying to this woman and he knew it. “Yes. But I wouldn’t. I would hate myself.”

“Loki has asked me to give you the redemption I cannot give to him,” she said. “Are you worthy?”

“No.”

She smiled slightly. “If I asked Thor, would he think you worthy?”

“He’s kind of biased.”

“Close your eyes,” she said, laying a soft hand on his forehead.

He did.

 

 

When he opened them again, the golden light was gone, and fresh logs were crackling busily in the fireplace. He moved gingerly, but realized that the pain was gone, and when he sat up and reached down to pull the bandages away, there was only a pink scar where the surgical wound had been. He pressed at it, but there was no tenderness, no hurt. He looked up and found Loki sitting on the sofa, legs crossed, watching him with intent eyes. 

“Do you feel better?”

“Yeah. But fixing this…”

“There will be no more seizures.”

Clint shook his head. “I don’t believe that.”

Loki smiled ruefully. “I lie, Agent Barton. But my mother does not.”

“What if I let you take me back and they start again?”

“They won’t.”

There was a certainty and calm in Loki’s voice that hadn’t been there before. 

“Alright,” Clint said. “But why…”

“You heard what I told her.”

“Is there something I should know?” he asked, meeting Loki’s eyes. “Or do I not want to?”

“I think it would be better for both of us if you didn’t,” Loki said quietly. 

“Will I see you again?”

“Do you want to?”

The sharp retort that he’d be perfectly happy if he never saw Loki’s face again was on his lips, but he couldn’t say it. 

“I don’t know,” he said, finally. 

“Then neither do I.”

“Thor would like to see you,” Clint said. “I know you think… but he’d still like to see you. Maybe not right now, when they’re all freaking out because they think you kidnapped me, but… later.”

“And your team would allow that?”

“I’ll talk to them.”

Loki smiled slightly. “Very well. Shall I return you to them, then?”

“Probably, before somebody has a heart attack.”

Loki laid a hand on Clint’s arm. Clint looked up at him again. 

“I’m not going to thank you.”

“I do not deserve it,” Loki said. “Perhaps one day, I will. But not yet.”

 

 

 

The world jumped and twisted and lurched, and for a moment there was no ground under his feet and no air in his lungs, and then just as suddenly he found himself laying on a carpeted floor with sunlight streaming in through the glass panels that made up one wall of the team’s living room, gasping for breath, dazed, and bare-skinned. 

“Holy shit!”

Tony’s familiar voice came from somewhere, but he hadn’t gotten his brain and body together enough to turn and look yet. 

“What?” Bruce called. 

“Guess what just appeared in the middle of the living room floor?”

“Did you piss yourself again?” Bruce said, his voice coming closer. “Because nobody thinks a puddle is a… holy shit. JARVIS! Call the rest of the team. Tony, grab that blanket off the couch…”

Clint felt hands on him, familiar and warm ones, as Bruce rolled him over and studied his face. 

“Clint, are you okay?”

He nodded. 

“Did Loki hurt you?”

“No.”

“You’re…”

“I’m fine,” he murmured, melting into the soft blanket Tony was wrapping around him. “Everything’s fine.”


	16. Chapter 16

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> SUMMARY: Why nobody on this team should even bother to try to keep secrets from anybody else. OR: Why Tony should probably learn that there are good times to NOT say stuff... but he's not going to. OR: How Clint manages to start fights without even being present. OR: Thor's unorthodox debriefing techniques. Any of those will work.   
> .  
> .  
> .

Of course, once the rest of the team arrived there were too many voices talking and too many people touching him, but Clint was starting to reassemble his thoughts and managed to pull on the pair of pants someone handed him and try to make sense of what everyone was trying to ask him. Finally, though, he gave up and held up his hands. 

“Hey… not all at once, guys…”

Natasha was kneeling in front of him, and she motioned for the others to be quiet, with limited success. 

“Are you hurt?”

“No.”

“Okay. Are you compromised?”

These were familiar questions. Clint had been debriefed enough times, even if it wasn’t usually Natasha asking the questions, and at least these were questions he knew how to answer. 

“No.”

“Did you release any classified information?”

“No.”

He knew there wasn’t really any classified information he would have released, under the circumstances, but he also knew what Natasha was doing, bringing him back to reality with a routine they both knew, one that was associated with coming out of fucked-up places and back to safe ones. 

“Do you need to be isolated from others for any reason that you’re aware of?”

“No.”

“Have you been exposed to any radiation or toxic substances that you’re aware of?”

“No.”

“Is there any information you obtained that needs to be addressed urgently?”

“No.”

“Is your current location known to dangerous parties or is your safety currently compromised?”

“No.”

She reached out and shook his shoulder. “Clint… Loki knows where you are.”

“He’s not a danger.”

“He took you.”

“Because I asked him to. He didn’t hurt me. He didn’t do… anything. Nothing. He barely touched me. And if he wanted to hurt me, he had lots of chances.”

She sat back on her heels, smiling slightly. “Just checking to see if you were just answering on autopilot.”

“Nope. If I thought he was a danger… to any of us… I’d tell you.”

“I don’t…”

JARVIS interrupted her. “Agent Romanov, Director Fury demands that you and Captain Rogers contact him immediately on a secured line to discuss…”

“Shit,” she muttered, glancing at Steve. 

Tony frowned. “How does Fury know…”

Natasha stood up and motioned to Thor. “Get Clint out of here. Take him to your room and talk to him and find out what happened.”

Thor gave her a sideways glance, but nodded and reached down, pulling Clint to his feet. 

“Shall we, my friend?”

“Sure. I really don’t feel like talking to Fury right now anyway.”

Tony at least waited until Clint was gone before demanding answers. 

“It’s just coincidence that Fury’s calling you and Captain Tight Pants two minutes after Loki dumped Clint here? I don’t think so. You two know something Bruce and I don’t know. Why is that?”

“That was my decision,” Steve said. 

“S.H.I.E.L.D. has known for a while that Loki was popping in and out of this dimension,” Natasha explained. “There’s a pretty big energy disturbance when he does it, although once he’s here, they can’t track him. But they know he’s been back here several times. And they’ve suspected he was watching Clint.”

“How long have you known this?” Tony asked, crossing his arms. 

“Fury told me a few weeks ago,” Steve said. “It wasn’t information I was supposed to share unless it became necessary.”

“Necessary? Seriously? Clint’s been being stalked and you knew about it and we could have protected him and you didn’t fucking tell us?”

“Tony,” Bruce said, laying a hand on his arm, but Tony brushed it off. 

“How long has Secret Agent Romanov known about this?”

“I told Natasha a few hours after Clint disappeared from his hospital room,” Steve said. “Fury told me they knew Loki had been here and that from the size of the energy disturbance he created when he made the jump from the hospital, he either had something or someone with him.”

“And you decided to tell Natasha this and not us?” Tony demanded. “What the hell? Why wasn’t this something the whole team should have known?”

“Because telling people who were likely to overreact and put themselves in dangerous situations when the situation might not require…”

“Fuck you. You’re saying Bruce and I can’t be told things because we’ll overreact?”

“No,” Natasha said. “He’s saying you couldn’t be told this because you’d have gone out and tried to find a way to track down Loki, and Steve and I realized that if you got access to the information S.H.I.E.L.D. has about his arrivals and departures, you might actually have found him.”

“Why is that a bad thing? We could have gotten Clint back…”

“That’s the problem,” Steve said. 

“What is?”

“The way you think,” Steve said. “Go break everything and grab Clint. Maybe that wasn’t a good plan here. Clint is back and he’s not hurt and he may have information about what Loki wants or what he’s doing…”

“But I couldn’t be trusted with that information because I might go break stuff and mess everything up,” Tony muttered, disgusted. 

“That, and Bruce would have gone with you,” Natasha said. “And Loki KNOWS how to trigger the Hulk. He knows how to make the Hulk turn and hurt you or Clint.”

“Fuck,” Bruce said, shaking his head. “You guys thought about this.”

“Yeah, without fucking telling us!” Tony growled. 

“There was nothing useful or helpful you could have done,” Natasha said. “You’d have made it worse. If S.H.I.E.L.D. is right and Loki’s been watching Clint all this time and not taken any of the many chances he’s had to harm him…”

“You could have told us. We’re supposed to be a fucking team.”

“It wasn’t her call,” Steve said, stepping between Tony and Natasha. “It was mine. I gave her specific orders not to release that information to you.”

“Yeah, but you were fine with releasing it to her, because she’s always totally logical and in control when it comes to Clint.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Compared to you…”

“Whatever,” Tony said, brushing past Steve and stalking toward the elevator. “He only told you because he’s fucking you anyway.”

Before Natasha or anyone else could say a word, Steve’s hand shot out and locked around Tony’s throat, lifting him off the ground. Tony tugged desperately at the fingers tightening around his neck, but couldn’t budge them. 

“Steve! Stop it!”

“You will not talk about a lady like that,” Steve said, his voice cold. 

Natasha spun toward Bruce; his jaw was clenched and he was breathing hard. She grabbed him by the arms. 

“Bruce. Don’t. It’s okay. Steve’s not going to hurt Tony. He’s going to put Tony down. Right now. Aren’t you, Steve?”

Steve shrugged and dropped Tony, letting him crumple to the floor, glaring and rubbing his neck. 

“Thanks a lot, Captain Asshole.”

“Tony, shut up,” Natasha warned. “Bruce? You okay?”

He closed his eyes and nodded. “Yeah. Other Guy’s where he should be. It’s okay.”

She turned on the other two with flashing eyes. 

“You fucking children.”

“Like that’s not something I would have said to just about anybody,” Tony said, his voice rough. 

“You were fucking baiting him and you know it,” she shot back. “You were baiting him just because you’re pissy about not being told things you didn’t need to know anyway.”

Tony shrugged. 

“And you…” she said, glaring at Steve. “What the fuck did you think you were doing? You can’t act like that every time someone makes an obnoxious comment about me. You almost had the Hulk out. Where’s your head?”

“I won’t let him say things like that about you,” Steve said, arms crossed. 

“If I wanted you to defend my honor, I’d ask you,” she snapped. “I don’t want you to. You don’t even know what you’re defending. Even if I did get information because I was sleeping with you, it wouldn’t be the first time I got intel that way and it won’t be the last. I’m not a lady.”

Steve’s face reddened, and he turned away toward the elevator. 

“Excuse me,” JARVIS interrupted again, “but Director Fury is expecting…”

“Steve is going to talk to Director Fury,” Natasha said. “I am going to assist Thor with debriefing Clint and I will report all of my findings to Director Fury as soon as I’m finished.”

“Very well, Agent Romanov. I will notify Thor that you will be joining him.”

“Can you notify Tony that there are occasionally times when everyone would be better off if he would shut his fucking mouth?”

“Ma’am, I have attempted to explain this to Mr. Stark many, many times, with absolutely no success whatsoever. I do not believe he possesses the capability.”

Natasha glanced over her shoulder at Bruce. “Then maybe you’d better put a gag on him next time he wants to talk shit about me in front of a guy who still thinks you’re supposed to punch people when they say bad things about a lady.”

“I thought you were still supposed to do that,” Bruce said. 

“Like I said, I’m not a lady. And punching people is for ten-year-olds.”

“What do you recommend?”

“Either quietly shove a knife between their ribs, or get over it and walk away,” she said. “They both work, but one causes a lot less problems.”

 

 

 

Thor was waiting at his door when Natasha came down the hall. She looked past him into the room and saw Clint on his knees on the bed, his hands bound behind his back, blindfolded and collared. 

“That your usual method of debriefing?” she asked, amused. 

“He asked for it,” Thor said quietly. “It seems to calm his mind. Let him have a few minutes like that before we speak to him.”

“He can still hear us.”

“That’s fine,” Thor said. “He may listen if he wishes. But he will be silent until we ask him to speak. And I don’t think he’s listening anyway.”

She glanced back at Clint; he hadn’t moved or shown any sign that he even knew she was there, but that didn’t mean anything. 

“Loki didn’t hurt him?”

“It doesn’t appear that he did. He has what looks like a healed but fairly fresh scar on his belly…”

“Healed? They only did surgery on him a few days ago. It can’t be healed already. Unless wherever Loki had him, time was different, or…”

“I don’t think so,” Thor said. “I don’t believe Loki would have risked trying to take him to another world, not while he was injured and weakened.”

“So how did the wound get healed? Loki’s not a healer.”

“No. He is not. Clint will tell us who healed him, and what Loki wanted from him, when he’s ready. Are you ready, little Hawk?”

Clint shook his head slightly. Thor nodded. 

“Give him a little more time,” he murmured. “It’s only Natasha and I here, Clint. You may tell us when you wish to speak to us. Anything that you wish us to keep between us, we will.”

For a moment, Clint was still. Then, slowly, he nodded. 

“Okay. Only you two. JARVIS shuts the cameras off.”

“JARVIS…”

“Done, ma’am.”

She stepped in and sat down beside Clint, letting Thor settle himself on the bed in front of him, slipping his fingers along the edge of the collar. 

“You are safe.”

Clint nodded. 

“Can you tell us what happened? Start when you left here and didn’t come back.”

Clint lowered his head and started talking, and Natasha realized that Thor had known exactly what he was doing when he bound and blindfolded him, because this was not the same Clint she’d been debriefed with after countless missions, the one who reported everything in monotone edged with sarcasm and never gave more information than he was specifically asked for. This was a Clint who wanted to talk, needed to talk, and needed to be freed of the responsibility of being his usual stubborn self. He didn’t speak directly to either of them, but told the story quietly, steadily, from the moment he walked out of the building until the moment he realized he was home. Everything he could remember that Loki had said, that he’d said, every touch, every sound, every glance exchanged. Natasha watched Thor’s face as Clint recounted the conversation between Loki and the woman who had healed him, and she saw pain flash across his features as Clint softly repeated her words about Loki being beyond her redemption. She reached over and laid a hand on his shoulder, startling him, but then he nodded gratefully and placed his hand over hers. 

“And then I was here,” Clint said. “That’s…”

“That’s fine,” Thor said, stroking his face. “You’ve done very well. You have an excellent memory, little Hawk. Thank you for speaking to us.”

Clint nodded. 

“What would you like us to tell the others?”

Clint thought for a moment. “Natasha can decide.”

“Are you sure…”

“You know what parts are for other people to hear and which parts aren’t,” he said. “All they need to know is that Loki’s still out of his mind but there’s no reason to think he’s planning anything dangerous, and that he didn’t hurt me, and that he told me a lot of weird stuff that didn’t make any sense but that isn’t really relevant to anything.”

“Fury’s going to want to know why you let him take you out of the hospital, Clint. And how you ended up there in the first place.”

“I ended up there because I got in a stupid fight and didn’t have any weapons on me.”

“Fury won’t believe that, but okay. What about…”

“I let him take me because I wanted to know what the hell he was up to.”

“That’s not going to work, Clint. I talked to Fury. He knows about the seizures. I don’t know how… I’m going to have to check and see if he’s been hacked into our systems again or got some of JARVIS’s surveillance video, but…”

Clint smiled slightly. “Tell him I’ll meet him at any hospital in New York City, his choice, any time he wants, and they can glue whatever they want to my head and I’ll show him they’re gone.”

“You’re that sure Loki was telling the truth?”

“Yeah. I am.”

“Will that be sufficient, if Fury already knows…” Thor asked, raising his eyebrows. 

“Fury doesn’t want to lose Clint,” she said. “He’s a valuable agent. If he can get scans confirming that there’s nothing wrong with Clint’s head, he can take those back to S.H.I.E.L.D. and give them proof that he’s cleared to go back to work. Fury doesn’t care how things get done. He just wants them done. If Clint’s fixed, he’s fixed. And you don’t think this woman…”

“Frigga? She would have done nothing to harm Clint. I know that with all my heart.”

“Okay. So it’s not like Loki was the one messing around in there. So…”

“Tell him he can have any doctor, anywhere, do whatever they want,” Clint said. “Then he’ll know you or Tony or Bruce didn’t get to tamper with it.”

“I’ll tell him,” she said. “He’s waiting very impatiently to hear my report. Do you want me to leave you with Thor for a little while?”

Clint nodded. 

“Inform Director Fury that being transported in such a fashion is very exhausting for humans and that Agent Barton should be rested and recovered for his screenings by tomorrow morning.”

“I’ll tell him that,” she said. Then, almost on an impulse, she reached out and ran her fingers across Clint’s cheek. He jumped slightly, then turned his face into the touch. 

“I’m sorry I scared you.”

“I should have trusted you,” she said. “You always come back.”

He pressed a kiss to the palm of her hand, and she had to pull it back and walk out of the room before Thor could see, or Clint could sense, the tears that suddenly burned her eyes. She stopped for a moment in the hall, rubbed her face, composed herself, and then asked JARVIS to direct her to wherever Steve was on his call with Fury. 

 

 

.


	17. Chapter 17

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clint and Thor discuss what Loki might be up to, including the possibility that even Loki doesn't know the answer to that question. Natasha and Steve have a chat with Fury, during which she certainly does NOT roll her eyes because she's a serious professional, and during which Steve is (probably) definitely not starting to sound a lot like the rest of the team. 
> 
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> .

Thor sat in his chair for a few minutes after Natasha departed, watching Clint. Eventually he raised his head, looking toward where he knew Thor was sitting despite the blindfold. 

“You going to say anything?”

“About what, little Hawk?”

“Come on. This is your brother. You can’t tell me you don’t…”

“This need not be about my brother and I. Not now. You need…”

“Maybe I need you to tell me what you’re thinking about all of this. Because maybe it kind of matters to me, and maybe I kind of still need to figure out what I think about all this.”

Thor sighed. “Honestly… I don’t know what to think. I don’t know whether to believe that my brother truly feels guilt or regret, or whether he is simply playing his newest game, as he has done since we were children together. I know him as well as anyone possibly can, and he has tricked me too many times for me to say that anyone should ever believe him, no matter how sincere he seems. Part of me wants to believe that he may not be beyond redemption, but part of me fears that he only manipulated Frigga into healing you because he has some use for you that would have been ruined by your being removed from the team. Part of me fears that he has a deeper hatred toward me than you realize, and that he has little to do but think of ways to hurt me, especially by hurting those I love.”

Clint nodded. “That’s what I wanted to know.”

“What?”

“Whether you thought it was real. Whether you thought he could ever be trusted.”

“I want to believe it. I want very, very much to believe it. But I also know that trusting Loki is… at best it is foolish, and at worst it is catastrophic. His urge to destroy seems to be even beyond his own control… he destroys everything around him, everyone that cares for him, everything good that could help him… whether he wants to or not. It is his nature.”

“And you think he’ll destroy me, whether he wants to or not.”

Thor shifted, and Clint felt his weight settle next to him on the bed. When he spoke again, his voice was very close. 

“My brother may be truly remorseful. He may not intend to harm you. But I fear he will, regardless. As I said, it is his nature. He destroys. Even things he loves.”

Clint turned his face toward him. “If you could see him… talk to him… would you be able to tell?”

“Tell what? Whether he truly regrets what he did? He might. If his vow to do you no harm is genuine? It might be. But whether he is able to keep that promise… even he doesn’t know that.”

“That’s kind of what I figured,” Clint said quietly. 

“I’m sorry if it isn’t what you wished to hear.”

“If I wanted someone to blow smoke up my ass I’d go talk to someone else.”

Thor chuckled. “I assume that the phrase ‘to blow smoke up my ass’ is not to be taken literally… although I suppose it could be. I can’t see it being particularly pleasurable, but probably not harmful, assuming that the fire producing the smoke was not allowed to come too close to one’s ass…”

Clint lowered his head and grinned. “Shut up.”

Thor laughed, and Clint felt a large hand stroke across his cheek. “That’s the first smile I’ve seen from you since you came back. It eases my mind.”

“He didn’t hurt me,” Clint said. “I promise. I would tell you if he did. I can’t… I mean, it probably means I’m pretty much fucked as a secret agent, but I couldn’t keep that a secret from you if I tried. From everybody else, yeah… but not from you or Tasha.”

Thor’s hand moved downward to tug at the collar around Clint’s neck. “Tell me what you need, little Hawk.”

“You know what I need. You always know what I need. Even when I don’t, you do.”

 

 

 

“I sincerely hope that wasn’t you rolling your eyes at me, Agent Romanov.”

Natasha sat up straighter and faced the screen, where Fury’s face was glaring out at her and Steve. 

“No, sir. Just stretching my ocular muscles, sir.”

“Nice. You get that one from Barton?”

“No, sir. He would’ve just rolled his eyes and admitted to it.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Steve making a fairly successful effort not to smile. 

“You think anything about this particular situation is humorous, Captain?”

“No, sir.”

“One of my best agents has been all kinds of fucked up ever since Loki showed up on this planet, and then your team, which is supposed to report directly to me, went ahead and decided to make a deal with him and play with a bunch of potentially catastrophic energy that could have…”

“Sir, Mr. Stark didn’t inform me that there were going to be explosions or inter-dimensional warps or any of…”

“I know. And you guys got lucky and didn’t create a wormhole that could have sucked in half the universe or some shit like that. But then you had Loki and you let him go…”

“He escaped,” Natasha said. 

“Yeah, yeah. That’s your official line of bullshit and I already heard it. I know this team. I know all of you, better than you think I do. He didn’t escape. You let him walk. And I let it go. And we’ve been tracking Loki popping in and out of this dimension…”

“The team is unhappy that they weren’t informed of that, sir,” Natasha said. 

“I’ll bet they are,” Fury retorted. “Didn’t get to strap on their proton packs and go play ‘Ghostbusters’ or whatever the fuck their plan was.”

“Basically, sir.”

“And when, exactly, where you planning on telling me that Agent Barton was still having seizures?”

“He’s not.”

Fury stared at her for a long moment. “Look. I know…”

“Come and find out. Tomorrow, if you want. Show up here, pick Clint up, take him to any hospital or any facility of your choice, and let them scan the hell out of him. He’s not having seizures.”

Fury’s eyes narrowed. “What do you know that I don’t, Agent Romanov?”

“According to Clint, Loki wanted to undo the damage he did to him.”

“Why would Loki want to do that?”

She shrugged and met his eyes through the screen. “Even heartless, violent assassins can have regrets, Director.”

“Point taken, Agent Romanov. But Loki is pretty fucking unstable, and we have no reason to believe he won’t change his mind and…”

“I know,” she said, glancing at Steve. “But the only thing that needs to be on the record right now is a clean bill of health for Clint’s head… one you personally observed and signed off on. If Loki decides to come back for Clint…”

“What happens then?”

“We deal with it.”

“With all due respect, Director…” Steve interrupted. “You did make us a team. And as I understand it, that means that it’s my duty to do what’s best for my team, and to make the safety and functioning of my team members my top priority. Am I understanding that correctly?”

Fury sighed. “You know you are, Captain. What are you getting at?”

“The team needs Clint. Safe, fully functional, and ready to fight. Bottom line.”

“So?”

“So whatever game Loki’s playing, it’s not my priority. If he comes for Clint, he comes for all of us, and then he’s the enemy and we’ll deal with him. But he’s not part of my team. You put Clint here for a reason. I can’t say I know exactly what it was. I can’t say I know exactly why you put any of us here…”

“Don’t get me started on that. I’m starting to question my decisions.”

“Well, you put us here. And Clint stays… or we’re not a team. So come and do your tests so you can make sure everyone at S.H.I.E.L.D. knows he’s cleared for duty and that he belongs here with us.”

Fury raised his eyebrows. “And what about all the videos of…”

“Nobody has to see those,” Natasha said. 

“I don’t see why they can’t just disappear,” Steve suggested. 

“Is Captain America suggesting that I cover up valuable and important information?” Fury asked. 

“Sir, if this is the first time you covered up valuable and important information to protect your agents…”

Fury chuckled. “Yeah, well. I do what I have to do. But are you two so sure that even if somehow these seizures are gone, Barton hasn’t been compromised in some other way?”

“We’re all compromised,” Natasha said. “That’s why we’re here, and not the rest of your squeaky-clean agents. That’s why we’re here for the dirty jobs. You knew that when you put us together.”

“You seem to be suggesting that I deliberately assembled a team of psychologically, emotionally, and personally compromised individuals to defend the Earth from the greatest threats it will ever face.”

“Am I wrong?”

“I didn’t say that. But I don’t want to hear you saying it either, Agent Romanov. Are we clear?”

“We are, sir.”

“I’ll be in New York tomorrow at noon. I’ll have made arrangements to have Clint scanned and examined, but I’m not disclosing where that will happen, so Stark and Company can’t try their usual stunts.”

“That’s what we want,” Natasha said. 

“What if they find something that you’re not expecting?” Fury asked, studying her face. 

“Then at least we know about it,” she said evenly. 

“What if they find something that means I need to make a decision regarding Barton’s status as an agent?”

“Then you make your decision,” she said. “It’s your call. It’s always been your call.”

“Tomorrow at noon,” Fury repeated. “And tell Thor he better not fucking shock me this time.”

“I’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again, sir.”

 

 

 

Clint hadn’t really paid attention to how much Thor usually talked while they were together. Not long discussions, or even complete sentences, but always a word here and there, a reassurance, an appreciative comment, an amused observation. He hadn’t noticed it, except that now he was sharply aware of its absence. 

“Okay. What’s going on?” he asked, pulling back from a kiss. 

“All is well, little Hawk.”

“No, it’s not. Why are you so quiet?”

“Perhaps I just didn’t have anything in particular to say.”

Clint squirmed. “Stop. Take the blindfold off.”

As soon as he could see Thor’s face he could see the lie written all over it. Thor knew it and looked away. 

“Don’t concern yourself with…”

“I’ll concern myself with whatever I want,” Clint interrupted. “And if you can make me dump the truth all over you, I don’t see why you can’t do the same to me.”

Thor smiled ruefully. “I suppose your honesty deserves that I match it with my own, my friend, but I don’t wish to trouble you with my thoughts.”

Clint sighed and shifted to the side. “Take the cuffs off my wrists.”

Thor unbuckled the smooth black leather cuffs, then reached for the collar. Clint caught his hand. 

“That can stay.”

Thor nodded and ran his fingers over the leather, pausing for a moment over the place where Clint’s pulse beat underneath. Clint watched him without moving. 

“He misses you,” he said finally. 

Thor looked up. “What?”

“Your brother. He misses you. I know what you said… and maybe he’s still going to end up fucking everything up and destroying everything… but I can read people. It’s part of my training and it’s the kind of training that started way before S.H.I.E.L.D. had ever heard of me. He really does miss you. And he really does wish he hadn’t done what he did to you.”

Thor smiled. “The things he told you… it isn’t like Loki to speak so freely.”

“I guess he had some things to get off his chest,” Clint said. “I don’t know exactly what he wants from me, but I know he wishes he hadn’t burned quite so many bridges, and I know he wishes there were things he hadn’t done.”

“I wish for his sake that it was possible to undo one’s past mistakes.” 

“Loki isn’t the only one who’d like to take an eraser to a couple of spots in their autobiography,” Clint said. “But I was thinking… human lives are pretty short compared to yours, aren’t they? So I was thinking… being in isolation for long periods of time isn’t good for people. I mean, it’s a form of torture. The longer you’re alone, the more alone you are, the more your brain starts to chew on itself… even if someone does come break you out eventually, it takes a long time to put your head back together. I’ve seen people who were never really right after that… and I was thinking that considering how long you guys live, that’s a really, really, really long time for Loki to be alone. And it’s definitely long enough to make him crazier than he already is. He said he was in the void, and there was no time there…”

“I’m sure it felt like an eternity, even for him,” Thor said. 

“The longer he’s on his own with no one to talk to, the more unstable he’s likely to get. I think that’s why he was watching me… waiting for a chance to make contact. I think he knew I might sort of understand… or at least not just try to kill him like the rest of the team would’ve.”

“I cannot allow you to put yourself at risk just to provide him with companionship,” Thor said sharply. “He is still dangerous.”

“We’re all dangerous. You… Bruce… Tony… Natasha… Steve… me. Any one of us has the capability for some pretty serious destruction.”

Thor shook his head. “I will not allow it.”

“What if you were with me?” 

“I cannot be certain that I would be able to protect you. Loki is…”

“Excuse me, gentlemen,” JARVIS interrupted. “Agent Romanov has a message for Agent Barton.”

Clint scowled. “What?”

The next voice through the speakers was Natasha’s, and Clint could hear the sharp edge to it that either meant she was under pressure or in mission mode. 

“Fury is showing up here tomorrow at noon and taking you to get your brain scanned. Just you and him, so there won’t be any of Tony’s computers or Thor’s electric shocks to get you out of it if something goes wrong.”

“It won’t.”

“You’d better be right,” she said. “And look… you’re going to be getting a full medical exam and Fury’s probably going to insist on watching pretty much the entire thing to make sure you’re not trying to sneak something past him, because he knows you… so please don’t embarrass me by going in there with a big hickey or something, okay?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Seriously, Clint.”

“I’m totally serious.”

“Fine.”

Clint waited until the light beside the speaker went off before he glanced at Thor and grinned. 

“I will have to be careful with you…” Thor said. 

“Fuck that. Just because she said that, I want you to pull out everything you’ve got. I want bruises that will have the doctors calling in specialists just to try to figure out what the hell would have left a mark like that. I want jaws to drop when I take off my shirt, and if they decide I need to strip… I want some old guy walking by in the hall to have a heart attack.”

Thor chuckled. “Are you certain you are in the mood for that much pain, little Hawk?”

“After the couple of days I’ve had? You’ll be doing me a favor. I’ve got a lot of shit in my head I’d like to get rid of for a little while, and having you think of really interesting ways to hurt me is a really good way to do that.”

“I’ll agree on one condition.”

“What?”

“The blindfold goes back on.”

Clint rolled his eyes. “What for?”

“Because it’s so very, very much fun to watch your face when you’re trying to figure out what I’m about to strike you with.”

“Fair enough. Might as well put the cuffs back on, too. Or go get the metal handcuffs out of my room… they’ll leave some nice ugly marks.”

Thor chuckled. “I suspect you may have played this game before.”

“Nope. Never.”

“Perhaps that’s why my brother likes you… you’re both liars.”

 

 

.  
.  
.


	18. Chapter 18

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Natasha is not amused. Well, maybe a little amused. Bruce worries; Tony doesn't. Clint and Fury have a chat, and just when Clint thinks he's settling in for a miserable but uneventful night, he realizes that it just either got slightly better or a whole lot worse. 
> 
> .  
> .  
> .

“Damnit, Clint.”

“What?”

Natasha crossed her arms and glared at him. Tony and Bruce, who had been standing in the living room discussing something, abruptly vanished into the kitchen, and Steve disappeared into the hall. 

“You did this just because I told you not to.”

“Did what?” he asked innocently, shrugging and heading toward the kitchen. 

“Clinton Francis Barton, get your ass back here. Fury’s on his way, and you’re…”

He turned around and grinned. “I’m what?”

She scowled at him. Apparently the fine leather collar and cuffs Thor usually used, which didn’t leave much of a mark, had been replaced with something else, because the skin around Clint’s throat was red and raw-looking, and his wrists bore deep bruised grooves that she knew perfectly well were from metal handcuffs. The rows of bruises along his upper arms were clearly the result of a very tight grip from someone with very large hands, and she was willing to bet there were similar ones in lots of other places. 

“Lift up your shirt,” she demanded. 

He shrugged and pulled his shirt up around his head, revealing a torso mottled with bruises and livid red marks, some thin and whip-like, others thicker and less sharp-edged. The marks ringed his body from front to back, and he pulled his shirt back down with a satisfied smirk. 

“You’re an ass.”

“Yup.”

“You had Thor do all that on purpose just because you knew Fury was going to lay into me when he sees it…”

“Why? You didn’t do it.”

“I’m the one who’s supposed to be keeping an eye on you.”

“Fury knows I’m a pain in the ass to keep an eye on. He told me I was enough to make Coulson quit his job if I didn’t stop making his life miserable.”

Bruce and Tony were peering out of the kitchen, and Tony snickered and whispered something that made Bruce roll his eyes and yank him back out of sight. At the same time, Thor stepped off the elevator and strolled into the living room, wearing absolutely nothing. 

It would be a lie to say that Natasha didn’t stop for a split second to stare at the naked demigod walking past her, but she snapped out of it quickly. 

“Thor! Damnit… we have a rule about pants.”

“Oh, yes,” he said casually. “I shall go find some as soon as I fetch something for lunch…”

“No… you cannot bare-ass naked in the living room when Fury walks in here!”

“Something tells me Fury’s not even going to be surprised,” Tony said. “Might as well give it up… bitching at Thor might get you somewhere, but I’m guessing that bitching at Clint won’t.”

She turned and glared at him again. “I will make you pay for this.”

Clint grinned. “That only worked when we were fucking.”

Thor grabbed Clint’s arm and pulled him back before Natasha could get her hands on him. 

“This isn’t funny, Thor,” she warned. 

“Oh, come on,” Tony exclaimed, emerging from the kitchen. “Seriously. It’s fucking hilarious and you know it.”

Natasha looked over Clint’s marks one more time, rolled her eyes, and let half a smile escape. 

“You realize how much of an ass you’re going to look like in front of those doctors, right?”

“Yup.”

“I beg your pardon,” JARVIS said, “but Director Fury’s car is waiting downstairs and he has given orders for Agent Barton to join him immediately, and to bring no electronic devices or anything else that could tamper with machinery.”

“Fuck… how am I supposed to play ‘Zombie Tsunami’ without my phone?” Clint complained. “Oh, well. All right. I’m out.”

Natasha waited until he was gone before she turned to Thor. 

“You heard my message. Why the hell did you go along with this?”

Thor’s smile vanished, and he returned her gaze solemnly. “Despite his protests to the contrary, I believe that Clint is very anxious about today’s examination.”

“What, that they’re going to find…”

“Not about the seizures,” he said. “I believe he fears that Loki may have harmed him, or changed him, in some other way he doesn’t know about. Being forced to confront this is… distressing.”

“So you beat him up?” Tony asked. 

Thor gave him a sharp look. “I gave him what he needed to feel like he still had some control of the situation, even if it means nothing to the results.”

“At least this way he feels like he’s walking in there on his terms, no matter what they find,” Bruce said. 

Thor nodded. 

“Are they going to find something?” Natasha asked. 

“No,” Thor said quietly. “Loki does not have to use magic to plant doubt and confusion in someone’s mind. His words are more than enough.”

“Excuse me,” JARVIS broke in. “Director Fury wishes to know who is responsible for the bruises and assorted marks on Agent Barton.”

“I take full responsibility,” Thor said, his expression serious. 

“In that case, Director Fury wishes to communicate his approval of your techniques and to note that your work will make his day far more entertaining than it would have otherwise been.”

Natasha rolled her eyes, bit back a chuckle, and walked away. Thor looked at Tony and Bruce with some puzzlement, but they both shrugged. 

“Guess it was gonna be a pretty boring day of testing otherwise,” Bruce said. 

“Approval of my techniques?” Thor asked.

“My guess would be that Fury knows perfectly well that Clint wants people to hurt him,” Bruce said. “And I’m figuring he’s seen people hurt him a lot worse than you did. You hurt him but you never harm him.”

“Oh. Well, in that case, I suppose I should be glad he approves,” Thor said, still looking a bit puzzled. “Is there something for lunch? I missed breakfast.”

“Could you think about at least wrapping a towel around yourself or something?” Tony said. “I mean, not that I’m a prude or anything, but it’s pretty fucking hard to focus on what I’m supposed to be working on with a penis like that waving around.”

Bruce snorted and turned back into the kitchen. “Glad mine doesn’t distract you.”

“It would if you were naked,” Tony said. 

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Want to get naked?”

“Shut up, Tony. We have actual work to do, remember?”

Tony sighed. “Naked later?”

“Only if you’re good.” 

Thor chuckled to himself and wandered off to find some underwear. 

 

 

 

“So, are we actually going to get anything done today, or… Bruce?”

Tony looked up from the circuit board he was working on, expecting Bruce to still be sitting at the next table staring into space, but he wasn’t. 

“Shit. JARVIS… where did Bruce go?”

“I’m right here,” Bruce said, sticking his head out from under the table. 

Tony looked down. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Fixing a bad wheel on this stupid chair.”

“You can have the bots do stuff like that, you know.”

“They already fixed it twice, and now it doesn’t work at all.”

Tony shrugged. “Well… I didn’t say they were great at it.”

Bruce slid out and sat cross-legged on the floor. It took Tony a few minutes to realize he hadn’t moved, and then he put down his tools and sat back in his chair. 

“What’s up? You’re not very focused. I was hoping we could get some of these security updates done today, and… yeah. Your head’s not on security updates, is it?”

Bruce smiled wryly. “No, Captain Observant. My head’s not on security updates. Sorry.”

“What’s up?”

Bruce sighed and shifted up to sit in his chair, testing the repaired wheel. “Just thinking about Clint. And Loki. And the Other Guy.”

“Hey, now,” Tony protested. “If you’re worried about what happened before…”

“Aren’t you?” Bruce asked. “Loki knows how to confuse the Other Guy. Knows how to trigger him, knows how to bait him. If he’s in Clint’s head again…”

“He’s not in Clint’s head again.”

“Oh, I’m pretty sure he is,” Bruce said. “What do you think they talked about for those couple of days? Why do you think Loki wanted him healed? He had to want Clint still on the team, close to us, and that means he could be looking to use Clint to get him in here to do some damage. And he doesn’t even have to do it himself. The bastard knows perfectly well that all he has to do is set the Other Guy loose and set him on the wrong targets…”

“That’s not going to happen,” Tony argued. 

“How do you know?”

“The Other Guy isn’t like he was. He knows us better. He knows me. Does he trust me?”

“He doesn’t trust anyone,” Bruce said. 

“I think he does. I trust him.”

“That’s pretty stupid.”

“I don’t think it is. I don’t think he’ll hurt me. You know what? Let’s test it and find out.”

Bruce’s eyes widened and he slid his chair back, the broken wheel screeching. “No. No, no, no, no, no. Not happening.”

“Yes. Let’s test it. I’ll prove it to you… he won’t hurt me.”

Bruce shook his head. “That’s not happening. I’m not letting him out. Period.”

“Is there any way you can sort of, you know, let him part-way out? Let him just come out a little bit? Or at least let him come a little closer to the surface?”

“This has nothing to do with you thinking it’s hot for the Other Guy to be watching us…”

“Not at all. Not even slightly. Well, maybe slightly. A little bit. But mostly it’s for science. I mean, you know, for testing his ability to recognize…”

“Tony, how much fucking coffee have you had today?”

“Umm… a lot? I think. Why?”

“No reason,” Bruce said, shaking his head. 

Tony slid closer, until his knees were between Bruce’s, pressing them slightly apart. Bruce gave him a warning look, and Tony rolled his eyes. 

“Come on. If we’re not going to get any work done, we might as well get something else done.”

“You’re going to get killed, and they’re not even going to know what to put on your autopsy report because they don’t have a category for ‘fucked to death by a giant green gamma-radiated psychopath’ in their system.”

“It’ll be a hell of a way to go,” Tony said, grabbing him by the hands. “Come on.”

 

 

Clint glanced over at Fury, whose attention was focused on the midday city traffic. 

“I thought you weren’t supposed to drive if you can only see out of one eye.”

“Do I look like I’m having a problem, Barton?”

“No. Just… usually you have a driver.”

“I’m not giving anyone a chance to interfere with things today. You, me, the place I picked… that’s it.”

“Fair enough,” Clint said. “Where are we going?”

“Private neurology clinic out in the suburbs. Not telling you the name of it.”

“Private clinic? We’re not just going to one of the hospitals?”

“No, we are not. You think I don’t know Stark is one of the biggest financial benefactors of just about every public hospital in this city?”

Clint shrugged, watching as Fury maneuvered onto the highway. 

“Seems like a long drive just for some scans.”

“Well, you’ll be there for at least 24 hours, so…”

“Wait… what? Hang on. No one said anything about…”

Fury glanced at him. “Is that a problem, Agent Barton? It’s a private clinic and they have very comfortable facilities. They routinely keep patients for 24 hours so they can obtain a full record of your neurological activity through an entire sleep-wake cycle. Just being thorough.”

“Yeah. Great.”

“You concerned about what they’re going to find?”

“No,” Clint said. 

Fury nodded. There was a long, quiet moment before he spoke again.

“You concerned about things they’re not going to find?”

Clint looked out the window. “You going to pull me off the team if I answer that?”

“Depends on the answer.”

“I don’t know what Loki wants with me. I don’t know what he’s doing. I don’t know whether he’s planning something or if he really is just crazy and desperate and lonely and doesn’t know what to do with himself. I can’t make that call.”

“Nobody can,” Fury said. “I talked to Thor while you were gone. If you were trying to make that call, I’d question your judgment. Loki is an unknown factor at any given time. When he had the Tesseract…”

“Or it had him.”

“Either one. Or both. When he had that, he was dangerous. Whether he’s dangerous right now is anybody’s guess. He’s never going to be trustworthy. But he may not be a threat.”  
“I thought everything was a threat unless proven otherwise.”

“We’re dealing with a mentally unstable individual who would qualify by most descriptions as a demigod. If whatever he’s up to right now keeps him from being a threat, I consider that a good thing. But I won’t consider it a good thing if you put yourself at risk of being compromised again.”

“Not going to happen,” Clint said, his voice tight. “Never.”

Fury stared ahead quietly for a while, seemingly focused on driving. Clint looked out the window and tried not to think about spending 24 hours under observation, shut in a strange place with strangers touching and prodding and staring at him. 

“You do realize that we don’t want to lose you, Agent Barton.”

Clint shrugged. “I figured you’d be looking for reasons to get rid of me at this point.”

“You were chosen for the Avengers for a reason.”

“Yeah… because I’m a freak?”

Fury might possibly have smiled for a moment. “Because it’s a team of people who can figure out how to deal with things that there’s no plan or strategy for. People who don’t need an instruction manual for how to deal with every problem. So they ended up being people who don’t follow instruction manuals even when they do have them. You’re not easily replaceable, Agent Barton, and the team needs you more than you know. I’m taking precautions to keep anybody from tampering with these tests today because I’m over at S.H.I.E.L.D. fighting… not just for you. There’s people who want the whole team shut down, want Thor sent back to Asgard and Tony put on a leash and the Hulk in a cage at the zoo…”

“That’s not Bruce,” Clint interrupted, suddenly defensive. “Bruce isn’t the Hulk. You can’t put Bruce in a cage just because…”

“I know,” Fury said. “And you’re a big factor in how well Bruce keeps the Hulk under control. And a big factor in Thor’s willingness to stick around here on Earth when he could be somewhere else. And you give Tony something to focus on so he spends less time doing stupid things. And I don’t have to tell you that when it comes to missions, you and Natasha work like you’re both operating with the same brain.”

“Oh, yeah? What about Steve?”

“Let’s just say you’re helping him adjust to some of the grittier realities of today’s world… speaking of which, did he see you before you left this morning?”

“I think so. He’s… umm… kinda getting used to it. Sort of. He just goes and hides now instead of flipping out.”

Fury shrugged. “It’s a start.”

 

 

Sitting on an examining table, stripped to his underwear, with several strangers checking his temperature and asking him questions and testing his reflexes and gluing things all over him, was not where Clint wanted to be. In fact, he would much rather have been huddled up in the bombed-out shell of a house somewhere in a dusty war zone, waiting for the barrel of a rifle to appear around the corner. At least then he was allowed to fight back, instead of having to sit and tolerate the constant pokes and stares and questions and demands. 

He tried to take his mind elsewhere; he’d been good at that long before S.H.I.E.L.D.’s training. He thought for a moment about that bombed-out building and how he had let himself focus on Natasha’s red hair, the way it fell across her face, the way the dust settled on each strand. He needed something closer, more immediate to focus on now, and suddenly he realized that there might have been a reason Thor agreed to administer so many welts and bruises. Now, with nothing else to take his mind away from the small room and the people and the questions and the hands on him, he let himself sink inward, focusing his attention on finding every place on his body he could feel pain and remembering where it came from. When someone grabbed his wrists, instead of recoiling he concentrated on the burn where the handcuffs had been. When unwelcome hands moved over his chest and back, he made his brain stay focused on the flaring pain as they brushed over red welts. He eventually realized that the hands were gone, and most of the people in the room. When he opened his eyes, there was only a middle-aged woman with dark gray hair and plain blue scrubs. 

“Better?” she asked. 

“What?”

“You weren’t dealing very well with that many people messing with you, were you?” she said, studying his face. “You hid it well. If you’d told us you were…”

“I’m fine. It’s fine.”

“How long have you had post-traumatic stress disorder?”

He laughed bitterly. “Before kindergarten?”

“You could have told us. We’d have been a little less… intrusive.”

“Are they done now?”

“Pretty much,” she said. “I’m the neurologist, and I need to check a few things. I’ll have to touch you, but I’ll make sure you’re ready for it. I’m going to test to make sure you’ve got equal muscle tone in both arms and both legs, make sure you can feel me poking you in various places, and then I’m going to look at your eyes, and I think that’s it. Can we do that?”

“Do whatever you need to.”

“No… can we do that without you blocking me out? Because I need you to actually respond to my questions. If I warn you before I do anything, can you stay here and do that?”

Clint nodded. The doctor was true to her word, quietly warning him before she laid a hand on him, telling him in a calm voice exactly what she was about to do, and by the time she had finished shining a bright light into his eyes and having him look in different directions, his pulse had returned to something like normal, and the urge to hit something had faded. 

“I’ll take you into your room and hook you up to your pack,” she said. “Don’t worry… it’s nothing horrible. It’s a box that all these wires plug into, and you wear it on a strap around your waist so it can monitor things while you move around. You can sleep, sit in the chair and watch TV... there’s a button to call someone if you’re hungry or thirsty. There should even be some books in there. Are you ready?”

“Sure.”

She led him down the hall and into a surprisingly comfortable-looking room with a bed, bookshelf, chair and table, and a TV mounted on the wall. The bare floor was cold under his feet, but a pair of slippers sat waiting by the door, and a white bathrobe on a hook. 

“You can put that on as soon as I’m done hooking you up,” she said, picking up a black box with an elastic strap. “Put this around your waist, and I’ll plug you in, and assuming everything’s working correctly, we’ll be able to leave you alone for a while.”

“Are those cameras?”

She nodded. “I’m sorry, but they need to stay on. If the computers do register any unusual neurological activity we’ll want to be able to check that with the video to determine exactly what you were doing when it happened.”

“Great,” he muttered. 

“Sorry,” the doctor said, shrugging. “Standard procedure. And your boss is pretty adamant that all standard procedures be followed. Do you want me to have someone bring you something to drink?”

He shook his head. 

“Okay. We’ll leave you alone for a while. I’ll make sure the staff knows to warn you before they come in and do anything.”

The door closed behind her. Clint looked around the room; it wasn’t a typical hospital room but it was still a prison, with cameras watching him and wires tracking every heartbeat and every twitch of brain activity. He fought back the urge to rip the wires off, made his way to the bed, flopped down on it, and pulled the blanket over himself for at least some semblance of privacy. 

He knew he wouldn’t sleep, but at least he could let his mind wander again, letting it take him somewhere else. He wasn’t sure how long he’d been away, lost in his own thoughts, when a voice brought him back. 

“You’re not asleep, are you, Agent Barton?”

Clint’s body reacted before his brain did, clenching into fight-ready tightness under the blankets. It wasn’t him. He wasn’t here. He couldn’t be. 

He opened his eyes and found bright green ones looking back at him. 

“What the hell…”

“I thought you might like some company,” Loki said, with a bright but not at all sane smile. 

 

 

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	19. Chapter 19

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Loki may or may not still be dangerous, but he's definitely still crazy. And he definitely still knows how to get under Clint's skin in all kinds of ways.
> 
> (short chapter, but I promised my friend Looloo I'd try to get it up for her to read before she went on vacation)
> 
> .  
> .  
> .

Clint stared blankly for a long moment. 

“You… fuck. You can’t be here. You’ll…”

“I’m not here,” Loki said, and to demonstrate, he leaned back and settled comfortably into what appeared to be empty air. “I’m sitting on the sofa in my cabin. No one can see me but you… including the cameras.”

Clint tugged the blanket so that no one would see him talking to himself and come in to see what the hell was wrong with him. 

“You can’t be here,” he insisted. “If you fuck up these tests…”

“I will not. Projecting an illusion like this creates very little energy disturbance, compared to transporting an actual physical body. Their machines probably barely registered it.”

Clint rubbed his face. “What… you still shouldn’t be here.”

“Would you prefer to be alone?” Loki asked. 

“How did you even know where I was?”

“I followed Director Fury’s vehicle.”

“Why?”

“I wanted to know where he was taking you.”

“Maybe it’s none of your fucking business,” Clint snapped. 

Loki shrugged. “Perhaps not. If you tell me to leave, I will. But if you would prefer not to be alone here, I would be happy to keep you company.”

Clint opened his mouth to tell Loki to get the fuck out and not come back, but the words didn’t want to come out. He found himself remembering what Fury had said, that whatever had Loki so fascinated with him at the moment, it might be keeping the unbalanced demigod out of bigger trouble. While that felt more like an excuse than a reason, it was enough to keep him silent.

“Was your team pleased to see you returned to them?” Loki asked. 

“You don’t need to know about them. You need to stay away from them. You need to stay away from me.”

Loki shrugged. “What will happen if I don’t?”

“Well, for starters, you’ll have my ass in so much hot water even Fury won’t be able to get me out of it. Steve plays by the rules… well, I think he still does. And if your brother thinks you’re fucking with my head, he’s not going to take it lightly. And Tony’s not your biggest fan, considering he knows what you did to Bruce, tricking the Hulk into attacking me. And Natasha just wants to put bullets in you, and she’s not really worried about how many.”

“So the fact that I returned you unharmed made no difference in their opinion of me?”

“Not really. First of all, they’re all pretty sure you’re batshit fucking crazy. And then there’s the part where they don’t even understand why you took me, much less why you returned me.”

“I see,” Loki mused. 

“Well?”

“What?”

“You never told me why you took me. I mean, what the hell you were following me for in the first place. What do you want? You must want something.”

“Hiding from Thanos is tedious…”

“Yeah, and there’s a billion other places you could be,” Clint muttered. “Why are you here?”

“Perhaps I don’t want to answer that.”

“Either you answer it, or I’m going to tell you to go away and never come back, and my team’s going to make sure you don’t. I’m done playing games with you. Why are you here?”

Loki sighed and slumped back into his invisible sofa. His eyes drifted, distant and dark. 

“The Tesseract…” he said, after a long moment. “It had both of us, for a time. We were not ourselves. Things happened… but not in the way I would have wished.”

“No. You’d rather I just have been your nice little brainwashed slave, instead of being able to fight back.”

“That is not what I wanted,” Loki said sharply. “I… perhaps at first. Before I understood. I didn’t realize, when I took you… I told you that you had heart. I didn’t realize quite how much. I didn’t realize how strong your will was. I didn’t realize that taking over your mind would mean… would mean that I knew so much about you. I saw your heart, and I… I have not seen another like it.”

“There’s nothing special about me,” Clint said. 

“There is,” Loki said. “But I don’t know what to call it. I have no name for it. It puzzles me, and I want answers. I want to know why you stay in my thoughts even when I try to push you out. I want to know how I took over your mind and somehow now you’ve taken over mine.”

Clint glanced toward the door, but so far, no one seemed to have noticed anything odd going on, so either no one was watching the cameras or he really was the only one who could see Loki. 

“I didn’t do anything to get into your head,” he said.

“And yet you’re there.”

“I don’t want to be. I’d be a lot happier if you would leave me alone and go away.”

Loki raised an eyebrow. “Are you so certain?”

“I’m pretty sure.”

“You never find yourself wondering…”

Clint frowned. “About what?”

“What it would have been… had the Tesseract not had us both. If we had met on our own terms, both of our own free will. What we could have given each other… the things that no one else is willing to give us. The things no one else understands.”

Clint’s stomach clenched and he huddled deeper under the blankets. 

“No,” he lied. 

“I don’t believe you,” Loki said, smiling. “It takes a liar to know one, doesn’t it? I know you’ve thought about it. I know that you wonder what it would have been like to have someone who was not afraid to take you to your limit… beyond your limit? Someone who would hold nothing back… someone not afraid to take you to those dark places where I know you want to go…”

Clint closed his eyes and focused on his sniper training, slowing his breathing and steadying his pulse before the staff monitoring it from their offices noticed that his heart was racing. 

“I don’t want that anymore,” he said, but his voice was so unsteady that he didn’t even manage to believe himself. 

“I know you do. It’s not something you stop wanting… is it? I never stopped wanting it. But there has never been anyone…”

“You’re a god. I couldn’t give you what you wanted even if…”

“You could,” Loki said quietly. “I could make the balance even between us. Think about it, little Hawk… I know my brother will never take you as far as you want to go… as far as you need to go. He doesn’t know what it means to have that dark voice in your soul that can only be satisfied by feeding on your own pain, your own fear…”

“Shut up,” Clint muttered, trying to wrap himself tighter in the blankets. “Shut up. Stop talking. Get out.”

“I know you still hear that voice,” Loki said, low and edged with something sharp and dangerous. “I know because I never stop hearing it. Your friends cannot give you what you need. They don’t understand. They will never understand.”

“Whatever you think you know about me…”

His voice faded when he opened his eyes and realized that Loki was standing over him, looking down at him with that knowing grin. 

“I know you. I know your heart.”

“You don’t know me.”

“Then why are you shaking, little Hawk? What are you afraid of?”

“Get out. You said you’d leave if I told you to. I’m telling you to. Get the fuck out. Now.”

Loki shrugged, and as Clint watched he began to fade, until Clint could see the wall and bookshelf behind him. 

“You’ll think about what I’ve said, little Hawk. And when I return…”

The door to the room swung open suddenly, and Loki vanished as the neurologist who’d hooked Clint up to the monitoring box stepped in, concern plainly written across her face. Clint tried to pretend he was asleep and hadn’t heard her come in, but he knew she wasn’t buying it. 

“Agent Barton, are you all right?”

“Fine.”

“Are you sure?” she asked. “Your readings went just about off the charts there for a few minutes.”

He sat up, frowning. “Does that mean I failed the test?”

“No, no… nothing weird neurologically. Nothing like a seizure. But your heart rate and some of the muscle responses…”

“Nightmare.”

She shook her head. “Look. We’d have been able to tell from your EEG if you were sleeping and dreaming. You were wide awake. Extremely alert. You want to tell me what was going on?”

“No.”

She sighed. “If you don’t tell me what just happened, your boss is going to want to know and I’m not going to have a good answer for him. If you were having a panic attack, after all the poking and the testing and the wires, that would be understandable, okay?”

He glanced over at her, realizing that for whatever reason, she was offering him an excuse. 

“Fury’s not going to use that as an excuse to have me fired?” 

“I don’t see why. No one would have known it was happening if we didn’t have sensors all over your body. Actually, your ability to control your responses is impressive.”

He nodded, trying to let some of the tension out of his muscles. 

“You’re safe here, Agent Barton,” she said. “If you feel like you could use some company, I’ll be here for a few more hours before I go home, and one of the night staff will be more than happy to come in and hang out for a few minutes if it would help.”

“I’ll be okay.”

She glanced over her shoulder before turning back to him. “I’ve done a lot of these. I was the one watching the monitors. I don’t know who you were talking to, but I know Director Fury warned us that there might be… someone who might try to cause trouble, or just show up and make weird things happen. He didn’t tell us what kind of weird things, but I’ve known Fury for a long time, and… if he says it’s weird, it’s not your garden-variety type of weird. You know what I mean?”

“Yeah. I know what you mean.”

“So, if there’s someone that’s trying to get to you, and you’d like some company to help make sure they stay away, we can make that happen. Actually, that would be easier than having you on tape looking like you’re arguing with yourself again. Okay?”

Clint exhaled and nodded, realizing what she was telling him. “If he shows back up… I mean, if he does show up… I’ll call for somebody to come in. I promise.”

“Good. It’s getting late… do you want something to eat?”

“No,” Clint said, feeling his stomach still twisting around Loki’s words. 

“I’ll get you some ice water,” she said. “And like I said… I’ve known Fury for a while, and he brought you here instead of anywhere else for a reason. He’s brought us stranger stuff than this. So the best thing to do is to just let our staff help you keep whoever… whatever… this is away so you can finish your 24 hours and get your clean bill of health, and after that…”

“After that, I’ll deal with him.”

“I hope you can,” she said. “If you need someone after I leave, ask for Jules. He knows about… things.”

She stepped out, closing the door behind her. Clint curled up tightly again, half expecting Loki to pop back into existence right in front of his face, but the room remained quiet and still, except for his too-fast, too-anxious heartbeat that seemed like it echoed in the silence. He didn’t want to think about any of the things Loki had said. He tried to think about anything else he could. But all of those things kept him distracted for about five minutes, and there was a whole lot of evening and a long night yet to go. He told himself that his team did understand, that Loki was wrong and mentally unstable, that he didn’t know anything about that voice or what it took to silence it. He told himself over and over again as the lights in the room dimmed and his body remained tense as a wire, waiting for his brain to signal that it was time to step down from fight or flight mode. No matter how many times he told himself that Loki was delusional, or that maybe Clint was delusional and had imagined the whole thing, the words wouldn’t stop running through his head. 

He tried, desperately, to ignore how hard his cock was, how it had betrayed him as Loki spoke and was still betraying him now. He refused to give truth to Loki’s words by acknowledging what they had done. He knew the release would take the edge off his racing thoughts, but if Loki was watching him from somewhere, wherever he was, Clint wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction. 

 

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	20. Chapter 20

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clint is not good at following rules. He doesn't listen to warnings very well, either. Natasha has her eye on things in Thor's absence. Bruce reminds Clint about a few things. And smut.
> 
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Clint had no intention of sleeping, or of giving Loki the opportunity to startle him out of sleep. He knew they would register it on their monitors that he hadn’t slept, but that wouldn’t surprise Fury or anyone else at S.H.I.E.L.D. Most of their experienced field agents had enough trauma and nasty surprises under their belts that they didn’t sleep well in strange places regardless of how safe they seemed. Clint knew a few that didn’t really sleep at all, not without sleeping pills. 

Someone came in eventually and asked him if he wanted some breakfast. He ignored them, turned the TV on, and sat cross-legged on the bed staring blankly at the screen until the neurologist arrived to unhook him from his wires. 

“You’re not going to ask why I didn’t sleep or eat anything?” Clint asked, as she carefully peeled the sensors off his head. 

“No,” she said. “None of the agents Fury brings me ever sleep during their study and most of them won’t eat anything, either. I’m guessing it’s in your training.”

“Sort of the unofficial part,” Clint said. “Food or drinks could be tampered with. You never know. If you have to drink something, you drink water out of a bottle or something out of a can… with water you at least have a chance at being able to see or taste the contaminant, and it’s hard to mess with a carbonated beverage in a can without the person being able to tell.”

She motioned for him to take off the bathrobe and began peeling the sensors off his chest. 

“Did I pass?”

She looked up at him and smiled. “No evidence of any abnormal neurological activity. You demonstrate an unusually consistently high level of arousal… not that kind of arousal. Arousal as in…”

“Right. Hyper-alertness and stress hormone activity. All the agents don’t test like that?”

“Most of them do. But you’re high even on that scale. Whatever’s going on with you, that kind of constant stress is hard on your body and your brain, and it’s going to affect your ability to function at an optimal level.”

“You going to tell Fury that?”

“He already knows that,” she said. “He says you have a team that your work with and that they’re fairly good at helping you manage your stress.”

Clint chuckled. “Sometimes.”

She ran her fingers over the bruises around his throat, and he was surprised to find that his natural instinct to jerk away didn’t kick in, and that he felt nothing but calm as she examined it. 

“Is this how they help you manage your stress?”

“Depends on who’s helping.”

“Is it safe?”

She asked with the same kind of professional, inquiring tone that she might have used when asking if he planned to wear his seat belt on the ride home. 

“They’re pretty obsessed with that part,” he said. 

“You’re not.”

He shrugged. “As long as somebody is, right?”

She pulled a chair over and sat down. “Look, Agent Barton. How much do you know about epinephrine?”

“That’s the same thing as adrenaline, right? I know it’s a neurotransmitter. Affects heart rate, metabolism, increases blood flow to the muscles…”

“Do you know what it does in your brain?”

“Not as much as you do.”

“Epinephrine is active in your brain all the time, but it’s particularly involved in emotional reactions and in memory. And in both of those, consistently high levels of epinephrine are strongly associated with negative responses. In other words, in the constant state of high arousal that you seem to be in, you’re more likely to perceive and interpret experiences as negative. More specifically, as threatening. It modifies and heightens the fear or threat response. It also causes memories that trigger that response to be more strongly encoded in memory and to elicit a stronger emotional response when those memories are activated.”

“So…”

“You told me yesterday you’d had post-traumatic stress disorder since early childhood.”

“Did you read my file?”

“No. We don’t get access to that. But it’s not my business anyway. I’m telling you this because, after long-term elevated levels of epinephrine and constant overstimulation of that fear/arousal pathway, some people become less responsive to epinephrine, and they’re so used to the hyper-arousal that they don’t like that feeling… so they keep looking for things to give them what you’ve heard people refer to as an adrenaline rush.”

“Yeah. Skydiving or whatever.”

“Except skydiving would be pretty tame for you, wouldn’t it,” she said, watching his face. “Part of a day’s work. You need more than just a thrill. I’m guessing that you either need a pretty significant level of pain… like these marks here… or you need to feel like your life is actually in danger, that the threat is real.”

Clint shrugged and turned away. “Does this go in the report? Because Fury already knows…”

“It doesn’t go in the report,” she said quietly. “But I’m trying to tell you something.”

He sighed. “What?”

“I’m trying to tell you that I’ve seen people who had pushed their limits so far that they couldn’t find anyone or anything that could give them what they needed without putting them in serious danger. You become numb to the level of stimulation and start needing more. And more. And some people end up on drugs but I don’t see that being you. You’ve got other addictions. But they can still kill you, Agent Barton. You can overdose on anything if you try hard enough.”

He looked at the wall behind her. “Can I go now?”

“Yes. There’s a car with a driver waiting in the parking lot.”

He finally managed to look at her again, and extended his hand. 

“Thank you.”

She smiled. “It’s my job. Take care of yourself, Agent Barton. Or if you’re not going to, let your friends take care of you. Someone should.”

 

 

 

Clint expected that he would have to sign out or do paperwork, but there was no one in the halls and no one at the reception desk as he walked through the building and out into the bright, chilly air. There was a nondescript black car with the engine running and a driver behind the wheel parked among the other vehicles, and Clint tried not to laugh at what government agencies seemed to consider “inconspicuous”. He’d suggested to Fury that they change the standard mode of unarmored ground transport to blue minivans, but the suggestion hadn’t gone over very well. 

He was a bit surprised when the driver, although he seemed to be ignoring Clint’s requests for some decent food, abruptly and silently pulled into the parking lot of a sandwich shop and waited patiently until Clint returned with two foot-long sandwiches and a bag of cookies. He slid into the back seat and reached for his seat belt. 

“Fury doesn’t appreciate people eating in the vehicles, Agent.”

Clint glanced at the expressionless driver. “You can tell him it was my fault and that you warned me and I totally didn’t listen because I’m an asshole. Want a cookie? They’ve got M&M’s in them.”

The driver’s face might have flickered slightly. “They do smell good.”

“Here. I got a bunch.”

“You’re going to eat all those by yourself?”

“Nah. They’re for the team. Or whichever member of the team finds them first.”

The driver chuckled and took a bite of his cookie. 

 

 

 

Clint had planned to go directly to his room and sleep as soon as the driver dropped him off, but he stopped in the living room to leave the remaining cookies and the last half of a sandwich in the fridge. When he heard the elevator doors open he winced, assuming JARVIS had notified the entire team that he was back, but it was just Natasha, still in her workout clothes and with her hair pulled back, face flushed. He leaned back against the counter as she reached into the fridge and grabbed a bottle of water. 

“Cookies?”

“Yeah. Figured someone would eat them.”

She smiled. “I don’t need them, and Bruce will probably try to stay away from them, and Steve isn’t a big fan of cookies, but Tony will probably eat the entire bag. Like he needs more sugar to go with all the caffeine, right?”

Clint was going to say something about Tony probably inventing his own stimulants if they ever took his coffee away, but something stopped him. 

“You didn’t say anything about Thor. He’s the eating machine around here.”

Her smile faded. “Fury didn’t tell you?”

“Obviously not. I haven’t seen Fury since yesterday morning. Just a driver today.”

“Well, last night we got worried when they hadn’t brought you home… nice of them to tell you they were keeping you 24 hours, huh? So I tracked Fury down to find out what was going on…”

“What did he tell you?”

“That you were fine and that the facility was secure, but that the staff had reported to him that they got some weird energy patterns that didn’t seem to be coming from you. And he was pretty sure he knew who they were coming from.”

“He wasn’t really there,” Clint said. “He was… projecting, I guess.”

“Yeah. That’s what we figured. The amount of energy he puts out when he does an actual physical jump would have toasted most of their equipment. What did he want?”

“Just to fuck with me. Mess with my head. Tell me things to try to… confuse me, I guess. Or bother me. I don’t know what he wants. If he’d wanted to ruin the data they were collecting he could have, so that’s not what he was there for. But what about Thor?”

“Well, we were trying to figure out why Loki would be so concerned about having you fixed up and then risk ruining it by fucking up the tests…”

“Because I was outside the tower,” Clint said. “He said something about…”

“That’s what Fury told us,” Natasha said. “Apparently he already knew… after the whole thing with the Tesseract energy and the mess it made… and apparently it made a pretty big mess when it showed up in Asgard too… the Asgardians decided that the only way to keep Loki from trying to use the team for his own purposes was to put their own block of some kind on Stark Tower. He can’t see into it, he can’t project into it… he’s locked out. That’s why he hasn’t bothered you here since he got evicted from your head.”

“They could have done it before that and saved us a lot of trouble.”

“Apparently if they’d done it while you and Loki were still connected it would probably have killed you. Anyway… they were apparently hoping that would be good enough to convince Loki to leave us, specifically you, alone. But it’s obviously not. And when Thor found out that Loki apparently doesn’t intend to stop stalking you…”

“He went to Asgard.”

“He’s hoping that Frigga can find Loki and talk some sense into him, if nothing else. Although I don’t think anyone can talk sense into him… he’s not wired for it. But I think he’s hoping Frigga can put some kind of protection over you to keep Loki away.”

“Hmph. Like garlic and vampires?”

She glanced at him. “You know the funny thing about all those vampire stories? They say a vampire can’t enter your home unless it’s invited in.”

Clint felt the muscles in his back tighten. “You saying I’m letting him in?”

“I don’t know,” she said, shrugging. “Just wondering if Asgardian magic works the same way. Just in case… be careful what you say to him if you do see him again.”

 

 

 

She went back to training, but for some reason Clint didn’t feel like going and being alone in his room after that discussion, especially since he didn’t remember exactly what he’d said to Loki the day before or whether any of it could have possibly been construed as an invitation. Instead, he grabbed some of the pillows and blankets that were always scattered around the living room and settled in on the couch, feeling slightly safer knowing that it was rare for much time to pass without someone wandering through the living room for something. 

He wasn’t sure how long he’d been sleeping before he woke to someone’s weight settling down on the couch near his head. He opened his eyes and looked sleepily up at Bruce. 

“You must be tired if you let me walk right up on you like that,” Bruce said. 

“Training,” Clint muttered. “When you get to a place you know is safe, crash hard and catch up on all the proper sleep you never get anywhere else.”

“You want me to leave you alone?” Bruce asked. “I was just checking on you to see if you needed anything… did you eat?”

“Yeah. I mean… yeah, I ate, and no, you don’t have to leave me alone.”

Bruce frowned and reached out to rub his hand through Clint’s hair. “You look tired.”

He might have been tired, but just the brush of Bruce’s fingers against him ignited the demanding need he’d been desperately trying to ignore. For a moment there was a battle in his head, with the more sensible part telling him that fucking anybody with Loki’s words still rattling around in his brain was asking for trouble, and the much louder part insisting that this was Bruce and Bruce was safe, probably safer than anyone, because keeping things under control and not letting them get out of hand was Bruce’s entire life, and that if there was anyone he could hand himself over to knowing they wouldn’t hurt him even if he wanted it, this was the person. Bruce was the opposite of Loki. He was everything Loki wasn’t. 

Bruce looked slightly surprised when Clint’s hand drifted into his lap. 

“I thought you were tired.”

“Yeah. I can sleep later.”

“This is the living room, you know.”

“Then take me somewhere else.”

He saw Bruce pause for a moment, realizing what he was asking for. 

“You sure that’s a good idea?” he asked, and Clint knew he wasn’t just talking about sex. 

“No. Nothing is a good idea. Everything I do is a bad idea. Take me somewhere else.”

Bruce nodded. “Okay, then. Get up.”

Clint rolled and set his feet on the floor. Bruce nodded toward the elevator. 

“Let’s go. Start walking.”

“Are we going to your room?”

“You told me to take you somewhere. So I am. Get in the elevator.”

Clint shifted to try to ease the pressure of his cock against his jeans as he stood up. Bruce glanced down and chuckled. 

“That’s good. I like that.”

Clint’s mouth had gone dry, so instead of answering, he started walking toward the elevator, feeling Bruce’s warm hand on his back. 

 

 

The elevator doors weren’t even shut before Clint went for him, but Bruce gently pushed him back, grinning. 

“Not yet.”

Clint muttered an incoherent protest; he wasn’t sure he could wait much longer. He’d heard Bruce give JARVIS instructions but he hadn’t been listening, so when they stepped off the elevator he was surprised to see that they were on the same floor as the training rooms. He could hear Natasha and Steve down the hall, joking with each other between the thuds of hands and feet impacting punching bags. 

“What…”

“Come on.”

Bruce led him down the hall and into a room Clint knew well; it was the small sound-proofed target range Tony had installed for Natasha to practice with her handguns and for Clint to practice with his bows. The lockers along the wall each had a square electronic screen to scan a handprint. 

“I don’t think…” Clint began. 

“Open your locker.”

He stepped over and pressed his palm to the screen. After a moment there was a soft beep and a green light, and the lock clicked open. Clint pulled the handle and stood looking at the assortment of bows, the quivers ready and full of arrows. 

“Which one’s your favorite?” Bruce asked. 

Clint reached down and let his hand wrap around the cool black grip of the bow, running his fingers over the string and pressing to test the tension. 

“This one,” he said quietly. 

“Good. Now… listen. Are you listening?”

Clint nodded. 

“You know who you are. We’re not going to let you forget. You’re not a toy for Loki to play with. We took him down, remember? You were part of that. You remember all the things you’ve done? Things you’ve survived that were bigger and more dangerous than Loki? You’re Agent Barton. You’re Hawkeye. You’re a superhero. You didn’t get picked to fight on a team with demigods and geniuses and the Hulk just because someone liked you. You got picked because you’re as tough as any of us. You’re human, but that doesn’t make Loki stronger than you. You’re just as smart as he is. You’re just as good a liar. And you’re a fighter. Whatever he’s trying to tell you… whatever he says he has that you need… you don’t need it. You don’t even need that bow in your hand. I know you’ve fought your way out of bad places without it. All you need is what you’ve already got, everything you’ve learned, everything you already know how to do. You don’t need anything that Loki has. It’s smoke and mirrors. You know what’s real. It’s right there in your hand.”

Clint stroked the bow for a moment, letting the familiar feel of it flow through his body, feeling his stance change almost unconsciously, shoulders drawing back, arms bracing, chest open, readying for the hard pull and the feeling of the bowstring tense and humming against his fingers. After a moment, he gave it a last caress, hung it back in its place in the locker, and turned to face Bruce. 

“He’s full of shit,” Bruce said. “Everything you need is here.”

Clint didn’t even quite realize he’d launched himself at Bruce until they were pressed against the lockers together, mouths locked in a bruising kiss, Clint’s hands twisted tight in Bruce’s shirt. Whether Bruce had expected it or not, he pulled Clint in and reached up to grip a handful of his hair, his grip hard enough to draw a low sound from Clint against his lips. 

“You can have this either way,” he murmured. “Tell me what you need.”

Clint struggled to think past the feeling of Bruce’s body against his.

“I need you to tell me,” he managed. 

“Clint, you know I’d be happy to let you…”

“I know. I need… not because…”

“Shh,” Bruce said, stroking his hair. “It’s fine. It’s okay. There’s nothing wrong with wanting this. As long as you’re with us. As long as you’re safe.”

Clint nodded. Bruce’s hand in his hair went from stroking to pressing gently, and Clint felt an overwhelming moment of relief as he slid to his knees and let his hands run up Bruce’s thighs. His fingers made quick work of zipper and buttons, and in a moment Bruce’s cock was in his hand, smooth and hard, but as he lowered his head, Bruce caught a handful of hair again and stopped him. Clint looked up, puzzled. 

“You don’t want…”

“Just making sure you’re okay,” Bruce said, his eyes dark and his face flushed. 

“I’m fine. I’m a superhero, remember?”

He heard Bruce’s chuckle cut off by a gasp as his mouth slid over his cock. He lost himself in Bruce’s response and what he could do to intensify it, completely focused on Bruce’s breath, the twitches of his muscles under Clint’s hands, the low moans that escaped him. He was almost startled to feel the hand on his head again, pulling him back. 

“Now what?” he protested. 

Bruce grabbed him by the shoulders and dragged him to his feet, and Clint swore there was just the slightest hint of green somewhere behind those dark eyes. 

“I want to fuck you.”

Clint’s cock pressed even more painfully against the tightness of his jeans. “Yes. Here. Now.”

“Do you think there’s…”

“Is there a room in this entire fucking building that doesn’t have lube hidden in it somewhere?” Clint asked, looking around. He nodded toward the first aid cabinet hanging on the wall. Bruce reluctantly disengaged himself from Clint to go and open it. 

“Huh. You know, there might be reasons why you’d need lubricant of some kind in a first aid kit, but I can’t see why it would need to be strawberry-flavored.”

“I don’t care what flavor it is,” Clint said, as Bruce pulled him back against his body and reached down to finally release his cock and run a hand over it. Clint’s head fell back and Bruce’s mouth was immediately on his throat, gentle over the bruises, licking and soothing against Clint’s gasping breath. 

“Down. On your knees. Arms on the bench,” Bruce murmured against his skin. 

Clint forced himself to step back, went to his knees, and braced his arms on the hard wooden bench. Bruce’s hands were on his hips, and then on his ass, baring him, exposing him, and Clint closed his eyes and let himself fall into it. 

“I’m gonna have to talk to Tony about this,” Bruce muttered. 

“What?”

“It’s kind of distracting to have your ass smell like strawberries.”

Clint muffled his laugh against his arms. “Just get on with it.”

The smell of strawberries was slightly distracting, but not nearly enough to distract from the sensation of Bruce’s fingers carefully working him open, and definitely not enough to distract from Bruce’s cock pressing into him, slowly the first time, but at Clint’s demanding whine he drew back and thrust in hard, shoving Clint against the bench and knocking the breath out of him. 

“Better?”

“Just… fuck…”

“Are you even using actual words right now?”

“Damnit…”

Bruce slammed into him again, and again, until Clint got his elbows securely braced against the edge of the bench and then he could rock back against each thrust, meeting Bruce halfway and drawing a gasp from both of them. 

“That’s too fucking good, Clint… I can’t…”

“Don’t stop…”

If Bruce had planned to draw things out, he’d underestimated just how frustrated Clint had been, because he wasn’t having anything to do with waiting, and Bruce was past the point of being able to coherently argue, so he dug his fingers into Clint’s hips and held on and fucked him as hard as he could, thinking that it had to hurt, but the sounds coming from Clint didn’t sound like he was hurting and they definitely didn’t sound like he wanted Bruce to stop. 

“Fuck… come for me. Please.”

Clint gasped and reached for his own cock, stroking it hard and fast with the rhythm of their bodies. Bruce felt Clint’s body arch and tighten around him, and he drove in deep and let himself go. 

For an alarming moment, just on the edge, he realized that the Other Guy was right there, just behind his eyes, just under his skin, closer than he’d ever been without forcing his way free. 

“Clint…” Bruce gasped, an attempt at a warning, but Clint was beyond hearing anything, and Bruce realized suddenly that the Other Guy wasn’t trying to get out.

As he slumped down and pulled out and wrapped his arms around Clint, he realized the Other Guy was scanning Clint’s face along with him, stroking his cheek, and that the Other Guy felt the same rush of relief when Clint grinned at him and turned his cheek into the touch. 

“You okay?”

“Absolutely,” Clint murmured, drained and content. “Your eyes are green. A little bit.”

“He…”

“What… he wanted to play too?”

Bruce shook his head. “He was watching. To make sure you didn’t get hurt. He wanted to make sure you were okay.”

“Huh,” Clint said, reaching up to pat Bruce’s cheek. “Thanks, Big Guy. Can we go somewhere with a bed now? I could use a nap.”

Before Bruce could answer him, the door to the room slid open. Steve recoiled in horror at the sight of the two people half-dressed and sticky and tangled on the floor together. Natasha rolled her eyes. 

“Seriously… there are other places.”

“Got side-tracked,” Bruce said apologetically. 

She shook her head and glanced at Steve. “I’ve seen worse. But you’re going to give Captain America a stroke. And why does it smell like strawberries in here?”

Clint opened his mouth, but she waved her hand. 

“Don’t answer that. Just put your pants on and go away so I can practice without having to step over half-naked people.”

 

 

.


	21. Chapter 21

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The team gets a big, ugly opponent to play with. Tony is not going to explain to Steve about anime tentacle porn. Clint realizes he might have a problem. 
> 
> .  
> .  
> .

A few hours napping in Bruce’s bed while Bruce sat next to him, tapping away on his laptop, restored Clint to a level of consciousness high enough that he could be persuaded to join the rest of the team for dinner and TV, although he did start to doze off on Natasha’s shoulder during one of the shows. Natasha didn’t seem to object, since she seemed to be dozing off herself while Bruce and Tony argued about the ridiculousness of the show’s scientific speculations on secret Nazi weapons in World War II and Steve’s occasional commentary on how perhaps since neither of them had actually been there at the time they should just be quiet and watch.

Eventually Natasha rolled him off her shoulder and declared that she was going to her room. Steve attempted to wander off inconspicuously a few minutes later, an attempt ruined by Tony’s observation that if he wanted to make it look like he wasn’t sneaking off to have sex he should at least come up with an excuse before departing. Steve might have muttered something that might have been questionable language and stalked off toward the elevator. Tony and Bruce continued their discussion of everything that was completely wrong with every TV show ever while Clint wandered to the kitchen and made himself a stack of cheese sandwiches, then came back and ate them while half watching the shows and half watching Bruce and Tony argue. Eventually Bruce and Tony got tired of arguing and led Clint off to Tony’s room for a somewhat slower-paced and more completely naked version of the day’s earlier activities, and then everyone was ready for some rest.

 

 

They had all assumed it would be a fairly uninterrupted rest, but it was early enough that even Steve was still sleeping when JARVIS woke them with the information that Director Fury demanded their attention immediately. Before anyone could protest, JARVIS’s soothing tone had been interrupted by Director Fury himself, wanting to know what kind of lazy-ass superheroes couldn’t get out of bed at a reasonable hour.

Tony rolled over and groaned. “What do you want? Are you our new alarm clock?”

“I wish. You’ve got work to do. All of you.”

“This better not be another one of your half-assed…”

“There’s a Quinjet on the way with an ETA of twenty-two minutes. I want Iron Man out ahead to look over the situation, so get your ass ready, Stark. You’re going to upstate New York. Research facility. Been working on ‘clean energy’ technology, which according to the emergency call I just got included opening very small, nearly molecular-sized wormholes and trying to harness the energy from the particle flow across the breach.”

“No potential problems there,” Bruce muttered.

“Yeah, well… something came through.”

“How big a thing could get through a microscopic hole?” Clint asked.

“You’d be surprised,” Bruce said. “Most of matter is empty space… the nucleus of an atom is incredibly small compared to the size of the electron field around it. Warping the space-time barrier can cause gravitational…”

“Physics lesson later, Banner,” Fury cut in. “Something came through, and it’s big, and it’s nasty. The facility and surrounding areas have been evacuated but as of now the thing is still contained within the building… it’s pretty heavily shielded.”

“We know what we’re dealing with?” Tony asked.

“All I could get out of the guy who called me was that it’s bumping what might be its head on the ceiling of a hundred-foot-high testing room, and that it has a shitload of what appear to be tentacles.”

Tony rolled his eyes. “Yay. So we get to play with something that came out of anime-tentacle-porn-land. And no, Cap, you don’t want to know what that is.”

“Shut up and suit up, Stark. You can be there faster than the Quinjet and at the very least make sure the thing stays contained.”

 

 

Eleven minutes later, Clint was in uniform and standing in front of his locker, trying to decide which arrows to bring. Beside him, Natasha had selected her guns and was collecting extra clips.

“Did our job description always include things from other dimensions?” he asked.

“Probably. I wasn’t in much of a position to negotiate and I know you never bother to read the fine print. Come on… we’d better be on the roof when the Quinjet comes in.”

He was following her out into the hall when she stopped and turned to him.

“You know, without Thor, there’s really no option except for Bruce to let the Other Guy out.”

“That’s what the Other Guy is for, right?”

“Yeah. But Bruce may need some help putting the Other Guy away afterwards… so keep an eye on him, okay?”

“I will.”

“And don’t forget how protective the Other Guy gets… don’t get into any situations where he’s going to get distracted from the primary objective and come after you.”

“Yeah, because I was totally planning on…”

She rolled her eyes. “Just keep walking.”

They arrived on the roof just in time to see Tony in his newest-model Iron Man suit jetting off to the north over the city. Bruce was standing with his hands in his pockets, looking very ordinary next to Steve in his full Captain America uniform.

“Tony should beat us there by at least fifteen minutes, probably more,” Bruce said, checking his watch. “He’ll be able to give us a run-down of what we’re dealing with.”

“He’ll probably blow it up by himself and the rest of us will just get there and not have anything to do,” Clint muttered.

“I don’t think this is the kind of thing Tony’s going to be able to handle on his own,” Natasha said. “Fury wouldn’t have called the team out… especially knowing we’ll have to let the Hulk out… if it was going to be that easy.”

Her last words were drowned out by the noise of the Quinjet blasting overhead and circling around to land.

 

 

Having somehow grabbed the seat next to the pilot, Natasha had the radio, and had called Tony three times before she finally got an answer.

“Stark! I repeat, are you in the building? Do you have a visual on the…”

“Well, fuck me hard and call me Bertha,” Tony’s voice broke in, and he sounded genuinely stunned. “This is something new.”

“What is it?”

“Ummm… Well, let’s say you took an octopus, right? And then you made its head out of some kind of weird flexible bony armored skin. And you gave it about fifty extra tentacles, and… looks like eight eyes… maybe nine or ten. And made it the size of a small building.”

“Fantastic. What’s it doing?”

“Seems to be trying to find a way out. It’s pretty much trashed the place slapping around with the tentacles… they don’t really look like octopus tentacles. They don’t have… you know. The sucker things. They’re smooth, but from the way they’re touching things it looks like the surface might have some kind of adhesive.”

“Don’t piss it off till we get there.”

“What? Sorry. Didn’t hear you. All static… damn radios…”

“Tony, you asshole…”

“Don’t bother,” Bruce said. “He’ll do whatever he feels like doing anyway.”

“Did he say ‘fuck me hard and call me Bertha’?” she asked.

“I believe he did,” Clint said. “I like that one. I think I’ll borrow it.”

 

 

Despite Tony’s tendency toward exaggeration, the thing flailing around in the middle of the research facility was uglier than any of them had been prepared for, a rounded, towering mass of mottled orange and green sitting on a base of wildly writhing tentacles, its body ringed by a circle of glassy, reflective, circular eyes with the hazy look of a dirty windowpane. Tony had apparently decided not to go in without reinforcements and was perched on an observation deck in the top corner of the room.

“Any chance of being able to put this thing back through its wormhole? Or any wormhole?” Bruce asked, over the comm link.

“No such luck,” Tony said. “It’s trashed pretty much all the equipment in here, and that includes the electronics they were using to generate the wormhole. Wherever it came from, it’s not going back.”

A tentacle slammed into one of the walls, sending fragments of concrete flying through the air. The creature made a strange high-pitched sound and flailed at the wall again, the entire building shaking with the impact.

“We can’t let it get out,” Natasha said. “So we’d better give it something to do besides whack the walls. Are we ready?”

“Ready as we’re going to get,” Clint answered.

Natasha nodded. “Call it, Captain.”

“We don’t even know where its vital organs are…” Steve sighed. “Okay. Tony, I’m going to guess that the best way to slow it down is going to be to go for the eyes first, if those are even eyes. Barton, Romanov, see if you can get up on some of those mid-level observation decks and get some shots on target. If going for the eye… things doesn’t work, we’ll have to figure out Plan B. And Bruce…”

“Let me guess. Keep it busy and do as much damage as possible.”

“Right.”

“Okay... ready on your word.”

“Let’s move.”

The order was all Tony needed to come off his perch and make a diving attack at the ring of glassy eyes, each one as big as a truck tire. Clint took just a moment to watch Bruce’s clothes rip as the muscles expanded under the green skin, then took off running. The stairs to the observation decks were smashed, but Clint’s circus training gave him more than enough experience to clamber up the remnants and crouch down on the deck, readying his bow. Across the room, he could see Natasha on the other deck, arms braced on the railing as she took aim.

The explosive rounds from Tony’s suit hit the thing almost at the same time as Natasha’s bullets, but apparently the creature couldn’t track the fast-moving airborne target, so it began waving its tentacles toward Natasha. She ducked back, and Clint’s fingers released and sent an arrow singing through the air to bury itself directly in one of the round eyes.  
The creature made another high-pitched noise, its flailing becoming more aggressive.

“That fucker just absorbed my explosive rounds!” Tony exclaimed. “Zero damage.”

“That was a flame-tipped arrow,” Clint said. “Apparently, explosions and fire don’t bother it much… shit!”

Apparently the arrow had bothered it enough, because suddenly something hit Clint hard enough to slam him back against the wall, and then it was wrapping around him, forcing the air out of his chest and lifting him effortlessly off the ground. It slammed him against the wall, sending stars dancing across his vision, but it didn’t get a chance to do it again. There was a loud thud as the Hulk landed on the observation platform, and then a growl and a wet, disgusting sound of something being ripped apart, and then the Hulk was peeling the remaining end of the tentacle off of him while the stump recoiled back toward the body.

“Nice work!” Tony exclaimed. “Now, get him to do that to the other fifty tentacles and we can all go home.”

Clint would have told him to fuck off, but he was still lying on the ground with his arms wrapped around his bruised ribs. The Hulk stood over him, alternating between glaring at the creature and frowning at Clint.

“I’m okay,” he managed, waving his hand. “Go… go get it. I’m fine. I promise.”

The Hulk grinned, turned, and launched himself off the observation deck, landing on the dome of the creature’s head. It didn’t seem to notice him there, at least until he started punching it. Then the tentacles came up and yanked him off, dragging him down.

“Fuck…” Clint gasped, getting his breath back. “Get those things off him. That many will crush him.”

The Hulk’s muscles rippled and the tentacles flexed, but they were tightening, and the creature had tossed a few more around him for good measure. Steve was hacking at them with the edge of his shield, but not making much progress, and Tony’s lasers barely seemed to char the skin.

“What the fuck is it going to take to kill this thing?” Tony demanded.

Clint hit the floor running; the observation deck wasn’t any safer than the floor with those tentacles flapping around. He ducked a few and reached over his shoulder, grabbing the first arrow his hand landed on, and jabbed it as hard as he could into one of the tentacles wrapped around the Hulk.

“What, poking it with sticks…” Tony began, but then he stopped, because something was definitely happening. The tentacle Clint had punctured was recoiling, but at the same time the flesh was rapidly dissolving around the arrow, and within a few seconds the tentacle was dangling uselessly. The creature obviously didn’t like it, either, because it shrieked and pulled in its other tentacles, dropping the Hulk and shaking the injured tentacle like someone might shake a finger they’d just smacked with a hammer.

“What did you do, Clint?” Natasha asked.

“Acid arrow,” Clint said. “Little vial of…”

“That little vial did that?”

“Apparently.”

“We need more acid,” Tony said. “JARVIS! This is a research facility. Give me specs. Where do they store the chemicals?”

“Sir, there is a hazardous materials storage room on the third floor. I am not able to obtain records of exactly what is stored there. Agent Romanov appears to be in closest proximity…”

“You guys keep it busy,” Steve said. “Natasha and I will see what we can find.”

“Get moving,” Clint retorted. “I’ve only got two more acid arrows.”

“Make ‘em count,” Steve said.

Great, Clint thought, as a waving tentacle swooped over his head. He pulled out the next arrow and raised his bow, taking aim at the nearest big, unblinking eye-thing. The arrow buried itself, and the creature howled as its tentacles desperately flapped at the eye, trying to get rid of the pain. The eyes were apparently tougher than the tentacles and didn’t melt, but the creature seemed thoroughly distracted for the moment.

“Go in on that eye,” Clint called.

He’d meant for Tony to go at it, but in the next heartbeat the Hulk was hauling himself up the creature’s body and was pummeling at the weakened lens. The tentacles grabbed him again, but this time he was ready, and before they could wrap him up he was ripping them apart and using the still-twitching pieces like whips to beat back the remaining tentacles.

  
“Show that bastard how we do things,” Tony shouted, darting by overhead. “Cap! Where are those chemicals?”

“We’re working on it,” Steve said. “I’m not sure…”

“Hydrogen fluoride,” Natasha interrupted.

“Hell, yes,” Tony said. “How much?”

“Two tanks, probably about five gallons each. Plastic, pretty heavily insulated…”

“It has to be stored in plastic. Eats through metal,” Tony said. “Do the tanks look pressurized?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay… be careful with them. Hydrogen fluoride is a gas at room temperature and on contact with skin it turns into hydrofluoric acid, which is the stuff they use to etch glass…”

  
“So if we depressurize these, this stuff will turn into a gas and melt this thing like a popsicle?”

“It and all of us,” Tony said. “You can’t let that stuff out unless we can clear the building first.”

“Then clear the building,” Steve said. “Everybody out.”

“How are we supposed to convince the Hulk of that? He’s having an awesome time beating this thing with its own tentacles.”

“Figure it out. Fast.”

The Hulk seemed a bit puzzled to have Tony landing on one side and Clint racing up to him on the other.

“We have to go, Big Guy,” Clint said, grabbing his arm.

The Hulk ignored him.

“Hey!” Tony shouted. “Come on! We have to leave!”

No response. Clint looked desperately at Tony, but then a thought hit him and he grabbed the Hulk’s arm again.

“You have to help me and Tony get out of here. We’re going to die if we stay in here. There’s going to be poison. We can’t get out. You have to help us. Get us out. We need you.”

The Hulk sighed, but after giving the creature one last slap with his tentacle weapon, he dropped it, reached down to grab Clint with one arm, and lumbered toward the door, glancing to make sure Tony was following.

“We’re on our way out,” Clint reported.

“Good,” Natasha said.

She landed lightly on the ground floor, and Steve landed beside her with a tank under each arm. They glanced at each other, then at the Hulk smashing his way out the door into the outside air.

“Get them as close to that thing as you can, and run,” she said. “I’ll be right behind you.”

“What…”

“I know what I’m doing.”

Steve nodded and tossed the tanks, which thumped on the concrete floor and rolled toward the creature, coming to rest among the tangle of tentacles.

“I thought I told you to run.”

“When you do.”

She shrugged, pulled out her pistols, and took aim.

“Let’s hope these things aren’t pressurized enough to get to us from there.”

She pulled both triggers, and the double gunshot ripped through the echoing space. The two shots struck the two tanks cleanly, and neither of them waited to see what was going to happen after that. They ran for the door, out into the bright sunlight. Clint caught Natasha in his arms.

“You okay? It didn’t get you?”

“No exposure,” she exhaled. “I didn’t hear a bang, so the tanks didn’t blow… they’re leaking.”

“That’ll work,” Tony said. “Considering how much that thing doesn’t seem to like acid…”

The shriek from inside the building was deafening, and even the Hulk clasped his hands over his ears and scowled. The entire building shook violently for a moment as the creature inside slammed itself against the walls, and then everything went still. The Hulk headed back toward the door, but Tony darted in front of him.

“No more, chief. It’s done. We got it. You did good. Shit… you did great. You’re awesome.”

The Hulk grinned.

“I know you want to stay, but we’re going to have to explain a bunch of stuff to Fury and some really unhappy scientists pretty soon, and we could really use Bruce for that.”

The Hulk rolled his eyes, but gave a resigned sigh and began to collapse back down into Bruce, slumped on the ground in nothing but the gore-smeared remnants of the pants Tony had designed to accommodate the abrupt size changes.

“Check on him”, Tony said, turning back toward the building.

“You don’t want to go in there,” Natasha warned.

“Suit’s coated with a non-reactive surface. JARVIS checked the specs. The acid shouldn’t damage it.”

“What about air?”

“Filters should maintain at least long enough for me to get a look around and confirm that we’re done with this thing.”

“Ten seconds. No more,” Bruce muttered, as Clint helped him to his feet. “The filters aren’t designed to handle anything that corrosive.”

“Well, we need better filters,” Tony said. “I’ll be back in ten seconds.”

 

 

 

Tony emerged safely, although the suit was smeared with what looked like greasy orange jelly.

“Well?” Steve asked.

“It’s definitely dead,” Tony said.

“I need to give Fury a better answer than that.”

“Fine. It basically exploded all over the inside of the building and every single thing in there is absolutely covered with a mix of melted alien innards and extremely corrosive acid. There isn’t even a tentacle left.”

“You realize that the people who own this lab aren’t going to be pleased about that,” Bruce observed.

“Then they shouldn’t have let giant psycho-octopus alien things come through their wormholes,” Tony said, shrugging. “They made the problem. We fixed it. We don’t do clean-up.”

“There are also going to be a lot of really unhappy scientists who are going to want to know why we had to completely disintegrate what could be one of the first specimens of alien life on this planet,” Natasha said, but she didn’t sound particularly concerned.

“Well, then, they can talk to the guys with the lab here and maybe they can make them another one to play with,” Clint said.

“Yeah, and not call us this time,” Steve said, wiping his shield on the grass. “If somebody wants to get Fury on the line for me I’ll give him a run-down. What are our recommendations for follow-up?”

“Well, hydrogen fluoride is lighter than air, and after a while, some of the acid might evaporate, but I’m not sure about the part that’s mixed with dissolved alien,” Bruce said. “The only reasonable recommendation is for them to go in with a haz-mat team equipped to deal with something that toxic, clean out as much of it as they can, and then tear down the building and destroy everything inside it. There’s no amount of haz-mat cleanup that’s going to make that place safe to walk around in.”

“That’s going to go over spectacularly well,” Natasha said.

“Just make sure you tell him it’s Banner’s analysis,” Tony said. “He likes Bruce better than me. Can we get out of here? I’m afraid this stuff is going to end up inside the seals on the suit joints if I don’t get it off soon.”

“Go,” Steve said, waving his hand wearily.

Bruce looked around. “I don’t suppose anyone thought to bring a spare shirt…”

“There’s one in my bag in the Quinjet for you,” Natasha said. “Pair of shoes, too.”

Bruce shuffled off toward the Quinjet. Natasha looked over at Clint and smiled.

“You look a little beat up.”

“Ehh. Just some bruised ribs.”

“You’ve got a red mark on your cheek.”

“Got bitch-slapped by a tentacle,” he said. “I’ll have to add that to my list of things I never thought I’d actually be saying.”

Natasha touched his face. “Looks like you’ll survive. And all that taken care of before lunchtime, too. Not bad. Was that enough excitement for you for one day?”

“Yeah,” Clint said.

He knew he was lying. It wasn’t.

 

 

.


	22. Chapter 22

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clint definitely has a problem. A problem that knows how to tell him everything he needs to hear. A problem that's exactly what he's been looking for. SMUT OCCURS.
> 
> .  
> .  
> .

No one walking through Central Park on the chilly afternoon took any notice of the man sitting alone on a bench away from the paths, head down, bundled up against the cold. That was exactly what Clint had wanted, and he had a lot of training in how to appear inconspicuous, nonthreatening, not worthy of notice. He watched with lowered eyes as people moved around him, most of them with their own heads down as they tapped at their phones.

“Agent Barton,” a familiar voice said. 

Clint had been aware of the presence behind him, but even now, he continued looking forward. 

“Yeah. Stalking me again?”

“Isn’t that why you’re here? Because you knew I would come?”

Clint shrugged. Loki sat down on the bench next to him, and he glanced over, taking note of the slim-fitting dark jeans, the thin gray T-shirt beneath the black leather jacket, and the sleek black hair pulled back from the sharp, watchful face. 

“You don’t get cold, do you.”

Loki smiled and shook his head. “No. Why? I had thought my new attire would draw less attention than my usual Asgardian garb.”

Clint couldn’t think of anything to say that wasn’t going to give away what was going through his head about the line of Loki’s jaw along the collar of the leather jacket, so he just nodded. 

“I doubt my brother has been terribly concerned with accommodating the local style of dress,” Loki said, leaning back. “I’m sure he was quite annoyed to find out that we’d had another opportunity to talk.”

“Annoyed enough to take off for Asgard to try to get them to do something about you.”

Loki’s smile faded. “I see.”

“He was gone before I got back from my 24 hours of brain scanning. I didn’t even talk to him. Fury told the team about your little visit and I guess Thor decided that if you were still following me around every time I left the tower, something had to be done about it.”

“I have done you no harm, Agent Barton… well, not since…”

“I know. But you’re messing with my head and you know it.”

Loki grinned. “Am I dangerous? Do I pose a threat?”

Clint gave him a sharp look. “You know what you’re doing.”

“I do. And I know you don’t want me to stop.”

Clint sighed and ran his hand through his hair. “I don’t know. I don’t know what you want…”

“I want you, little Hawk.”

Clint shivered. “I can’t… don’t you remember what you did to me?”

“It was a mistake. I regret it. I assumed I was powerful enough to control you. I was wrong. Others, yes, but not you. You fought back.”

“I…”

“I want to feel that fight again,” Loki said, his voice low and close to Clint’s ear. “I want to have you bound and at my mercy but still defiant. I want to watch you fight your desire. I want you to fight me and I want to force you to surrender, and I will hurt you as much as I have to in order to bring that about. I will hold nothing back. I will not ask if you feel safe. You will not feel safe with me. You will not be safe with me. I intend to hurt you, little Hawk. In all the ways you want to be hurt. I intend to make you fight. I intend to break you.”

Clint tried to tell his legs to stand up and start walking, but only one part of his body was responding, and it wasn’t his legs. 

“That’s not going to happen.”

“Why not?” Loki asked. “Are you afraid?”

It wasn’t a taunt; he seemed genuinely curious, and Clint couldn’t help but meet the electric green eyes that were fixed on his face. 

“I’m… I’m not... I don’t need that anymore.”

“Because my brother told you so? Because the socially incompetent scientists told you so? Agent Romanov knows better. That’s why she’s in the building across the street watching you.”

Clint scowled. “I told them I didn’t need anybody following me around.”

“She doesn’t trust you. She knows why you came out here. She knows that nothing has changed. She knows that what you want… what I want… they’re not things you stop wanting. You and I are cut from the same cloth, Agent Barton. We cannot be cured. We cannot be rehabilitated. We are what our worlds made us to be. Your friends wish to convince you otherwise… but they’re wrong. You know it’s part of you. You know the voice will never be silent.”

Clint looked up at the sky over the city and tried to keep his breathing slow and even, tried to keep his mind working rationally. 

“I could have harmed you at any time,” Loki said. “Every time you’ve left the tower. I could kill you right now, as we sit here. You know that. I don’t want you dead. I want you alive and fighting… but if you’re not fighting for your life, fighting to survive, it’s all just a sham, isn’t it, Agent Barton? The games my brother plays with you. The games the others play with you. Games. I’m not asking you to play. You know what I’m offering. You know why. It should be a sign of my respect that I offer it instead of taking it.”

Clint gave him a sharp look. “Are you so sure you could do that?”

Loki smiled. “There’s only one way to find out, and I don’t believe that you want to test it any more than I do. I come with an offer. Take it or leave it.”

Clint shifted his weight, acutely aware of the painful swelling of his cock against his jeans, and the sweat starting to bead on his forehead in spite of the cold. “Maybe we should at least talk about this somewhere else.”

“Why? It seems that one man whispering in another man’s ear is not an uncommon thing in this location…”

“Fuck you,” Clint muttered. “Somewhere else. And somewhere Natasha can’t follow us. But somewhere I know… I want to know where I am in case I decide to walk away.”

“Very well,” Loki said, holding out his hand. “Shall we?”

 

 

 

From her building-top perch, Natasha unleashed a stream of Russian curses as the two figures she was watching through her binoculars abruptly, silently vanished. 

“Fuck… Tony? You still there?”

“Yeah. What’s up?”

“They jumped.”

“Shit. Let me get JARVIS tracking it…”

“Hurry up.”

“They should cause enough of an energy disturbance to… huh.”

“What?”

“JARVIS says that they’re probably still somewhere in the city.”

“Probably?”

“Loki’s a smart bastard,” Tony said. “He knows we can track these jumps because of the amount of energy released… but he just jumped into the city a few minutes ago, and this jump was so close to the other one that the signals are overlapping. Can’t triangulate their destination. Even if I could, it would still be to within about a two-block range, and you can’t go banging on every door in a two-block range of New York City.”

“Damnit…”

“Might as well come back here,” Tony said. “We’ll see if when the energy starts to settle down we can get some clearer readings. And at least they’re still in the city…”

“You know how much damage Loki can do in a city,” Natasha muttered. 

“Well, hopefully he’s not planning on destroying anything.”

“You really think he came here to have a cup of coffee?”

“No. But there’s nothing we can do about it right now. Especially if Clint went with him willingly.”

“The way Loki messes with his head, do you really think he’s making clear decisions?”

“Give him a little credit,” Tony said. “We let you figure out your shit on your own…”

“No… you had Bruce design toxic gas arrows, modified my computer’s programming, and sent Clint in to…”

“Yeah, yeah. You know what I mean, though.”

“No, I really don’t.”

“Just come back here and we’ll try to track him down.”

 

 

 

After a moment of whirling disorientation, Clint realized that they were now standing on the roof of a parking garage, alone except for the rows of unoccupied vehicles, and that Loki had still not released his hand. He thought dizzily that he had remembered Loki’s touch being cold, but it wasn’t cold now; it was fever-hot, and the green eyes fixed on his face were unsettlingly bright. 

“Breathe for a moment,” Loki said. “This method of transportation is unsettling for those not accustomed to it.”

“A little bit,” Clint muttered. “Why are we here?”

“I’ve learned that I cause much less confusion and attract less attention in this realm if I attempt to make my appearances where there is no one to see it occur. There’s an old hotel across the street. They rent rooms by the week. Not exactly luxurious accommodations, but they allow payment in cash and do not request credit cards or identification or any such foolishness.”

“Where do you get cash?”

Loki reached into his pocket and pulled out a twenty dollar bill. He curled his hand around it, closed his eyes for a moment, and then uncurled his hand to reveal two identical bills. He repeated the motion, and then there were three, and then four. 

“Huh. Nobody notices they all have the same serial number?”

Loki shrugged. “Not yet. I have a few different bills I use, and I try to mingle them.”

“So you could be anywhere in any universe, but you’re here, renting a shithole hotel room and…”

Loki fixed him with a sharp look. “I have limited options, Agent Barton. If I return home, I will be imprisoned or put to death. Thanos has a bounty on my head and there are many people in many worlds eager to collect it. I have no friends to shelter me. I have no family to stand by me. If this world is the only place so isolated from the other realms that the bounty hunters have not pursued me here…”

“It has nothing to do with the fact that your brother and I are here,” Clint said. 

Loki smiled slightly. “There is no comfort in any world where one has no people. My family has turned its back on me, if they were ever truly my family at all. Those who pretended loyalty to me now curse my name.”

“But there are two people who just can’t seem to walk away, aren’t there,” Clint said. “No matter how much you hurt them, or how many times you betray them.”

“My brother may be beyond forgiveness,” Loki said, lowering his head. “I… if he is, it is only what I have earned by my actions. And as for you, Agent Barton…”

“Clint,” he said quietly. 

“Clint,” Loki repeated. “You know what it means to be alone. To have those who were supposed to protect you turn their backs on you. To be unwanted, to have to fight for everything, even to survive. You know what it means to have an emptiness that cannot be filled no matter how desperately you try. And you, of all people, might be able to understand why… might be able to understand me.”

“It would be a lot easier if I didn’t,” Clint said. 

“I know,” Loki said, raising a hand to brush across Clint’s cheek. “I would not wish myself upon anyone. I am without options.”

“Is that what I am? Your last resort?”

Loki shook his head. “No. I would have come back here for you even if Asgard had welcomed me home and placed me on the throne. You are… the one thing I cannot stop wanting.”

There were lots of logical and rational voices in Clint’s head screaming at him to get away from this while he still could, but he had a lot of practice at ignoring those voices, and when Loki closed the small distance between them and pulled him in and kissed him, the raw heat and need and longing and frustration that burned through him drove everything else into silence. He didn’t even realize for a moment that his hands were clutching at the t-shirt under the leather jacket, or that his heart was pounding in his chest, or that Loki’s hands were at his waist, drawing him closer. Awareness jolted through him when their bodies made full contact, pressed hard together, and Clint forced himself to break the kiss and struggle to get his breath back. 

“We’re not… not now. What you said, before. That you were going to do. Not now.”

Loki nodded and lowered his head to press his lips to Clint’s throat. “No. Not yet. I will give you those things, and you will want them. But not yet.”

Clint bit back a gasp and gripped the smooth black hair and tangled his fingers in it. “Well, if you’re going to keep that up you’d better fucking take me somewhere where we can at least do something.”

He felt Loki’s smile against his skin. “That can be arranged, Agent… Clint.”

He drew back, stepped away, and motioned toward the exit sign. Clint followed him, the warning voices in his head struggling desperately to reach him, but without success. He’d learned in the circus to stop listening to those voices, when he was still just a child. You had to, if you were going to let someone throw knives at you, if you were going to step onto a tightrope, if you were going to swing out into empty air. Everyone had voices that told them not to put themselves in danger. Clint was very, very good at ignoring his. 

 

 

 

The lobby of the old hotel had faded floral wallpaper stained yellow by countless years of cigarette smoke, more of which was being produced by the four old men sitting around a table in front of the television, watching the news and arguing with each other. Behind the counter, an elderly woman with her silver-streaked hair in a tight bun looked up from whatever she was reading, looked Loki and Clint over, and gave them a knowing grin. Whatever she said, Clint couldn’t understand it; he was fairly sure the language was Vietnamese but that wasn’t one he knew any of. Loki laughed and answered her fluently, and she giggled and wagged a finger at him. Loki threw up his hands in mock surrender, then turned and walked toward the elevator. 

“What was that?”

Loki chuckled. “She thinks you’re a whore.”

“What? Why?”

“Because people don’t bring dates here. They only bring whores. She says, however, that you are a very handsome whore and that you’re probably expensive and that I’d better not be short on next week’s rent because I’m spending the money on you.”

Clint shrugged. “At least she thinks I’m a high-class whore. You speak Vietnamese?”

“I thought I might as well learn it. The landlady seems amused, although don’t be fooled… she speaks perfect English.”

The elevator creaked and groaned and shuddered its way up toward the ninth floor. 

“Does this thing ever break?”

“Occasionally,” Loki said. “It’s usually repaired quickly, although how quickly depends upon how many people are inconvenienced by its failure and whether they’re people who pay their rent consistently. I am very consistent, which is why everything in my room is always working.”

They stepped out of the elevator and Loki took out a key. He swung the door open, revealing a plain room with a double bed, a table in the corner with an old microwave and a lamp, a door leading into a dingy-looking bathroom, and a cloudy window with a close-up view of the building next door. The bed was neatly made, though, and the sheets looked spotlessly clean, and when Clint glanced into the bathroom he could see that despite the discoloration of the once-white bathtub and sink, everything was scrubbed to a shine. 

“A little different from Asgard?”

Loki smiled bitterly. “Such luxury was never meant for me. I should have been left to die among the ruins, abandoned by my own kind. I belong nowhere, and this is a place for those who belong nowhere.”

“So is the circus,” Clint said. “Live in tents and campers, a new town every week, people staring at you like you’re some kind of sub-human while they’re walking around spending all their money on the rigged games and the trick acts…”

“I told you. We are cut from the same cloth, you and I,” Loki said, holding his hands out to his sides, palms open. 

Clint wanted to say that it wasn’t true, that he wasn’t anything like Loki, that he shouldn’t be here and this shouldn’t be happening and that he was an idiot for even walking out into the park that day, but he couldn’t say anything at all. He closed his eyes instead, and felt hands on his shoulders, a warm body pressing close to his, and then a kiss, burning hot and rough with demand and desperate need, and his own hands reached out and started fumbling to slide the leather jacket off Loki’s shoulders. Loki smiled against his lips and shrugged out of the jacket, letting it hit the floor as he tugged at the buttons of Clint’s coat while Clint tugged at his shirt, his hands finding the heated bare skin beneath it. Loki inhaled sharply at the touch. 

“Your hands are cold.”

“It’s a human thing.”

“I will warm them,” Loki chuckled, and he stepped back and pulled off his shirt while Clint hurried to get free of his own clothes. He was down to his jeans and boots when Loki’s hands came to rest on his shoulders and steered him to sit down on the bed. Clint looked up, and although he knew that Loki and Thor were not blood brothers, he couldn’t help but compare them for a moment. Loki was tall, but instead of having Thor’s powerful and sculpted muscles, he was almost thin, wiry and strong, his skin smooth and very pale except for the dark hair falling around his face and the dark curls that were revealed as he slid out of what was left of his clothes. Before Clint could speak, or even think, Loki had reached down to pull off his boots and was pressing him back on the bed, working at his jeans with quick fingers while his mouth played over the soft skin just above. 

“Fuck…” Clint murmured. 

Loki grinned up at him. “Does this please you?”

“You know it does. You should, anyway, considering where your hands are.”

Loki tugged, and Clint was suddenly naked, exposed to the bright, watchful green gaze. 

“Yes. I had noticed that. You seem very eager.”

“You don’t seem any less eager,” Clint retorted, while mentally calculating that although Loki’s cock didn’t have quite the girth that made Thor’s so difficult to accommodate, it certainly wasn’t going to be effortless. He realized, with a chill, that he should already know this, that he had been here before, seen this before…

“No,” Loki said, leaning over him. “That was… it was not me. It was not you. Those were… other people. People controlled by forces they could not control… even if they were foolish enough to think they could.”

It wasn’t quite the truth, but it was close enough, and it was easier and less messy than the truth, and Clint wasn’t sure his brain was ever going to give him back the entire truth anyway, or if he wanted it, so he pulled Loki down and kissed him, feeling Loki’s arms twine around him as they rolled onto the bed together. Clint was fairly certain that if any human’s body temperature had been as high as Loki’s, they would be in the hospital, because everywhere his skin touched Clint’s it seemed to be on fire, and his mouth burned everywhere it made contact. 

“What do you want?” he asked, or tried to. 

Loki looked up and met his eyes. “This time, I want… I want you. I want you to…”

Clint rolled them until he was pinning Loki’s body to the bed, feeling the coiled strength beneath him. Loki stared up at him. 

“You want me to fuck you?”

“Yes.”

Clint lowered his head to kiss him again, because if he didn’t, he knew Loki would be able to see everything that was racing through his mind, the sudden flood of frustration and bitterness and confusion and hurt. He should have known Loki would see it anyway. 

“This is not what you’ve become accustomed to, is it,” he whispered. 

Clint shook his head. 

“You’ve become accustomed to being treated as though you were broken. As though you needed special handling, needed to be watched, needed to be tended to.”

Clint gritted his teeth. “Tired of them watching my face to see if I’m okay the whole time. Tired of sympathy fucks. Tired of therapy fucks. Tired of them trying to fix me.”

Loki’s fingers ran through his hair. “You cannot be fixed, little Hawk. And you don’t want to be. To cure your distance and your rage would be to tame you, to make you a pretty bird in a cage. Some of us who have never been whole know that we are stronger damaged. You know it. You know that the things they try to cure you of are the things that make you strong.”

Clint swallowed hard. “They…”

“Yes, of course they care for you,” Loki murmured. “In their own misguided way, they think they are helping you.”

“What about you?”

“I’m not here to help you. I’m here because I need something. And you need it too. So we come together as equals. Equally broken. Equally alone. Equal in our desire.”

He reached down and wrapped his hand around Clint’s cock, stroking it back to full hardness. Clint shoved the other thoughts down. 

“I don’t have anything to… you know. To use for…”

Loki grasped Clint’s wrist and took two of his fingers into the heat of his mouth, grinning around them when Clint’s cock throbbed between their bodies as his tongue worked. 

“We will make do,” he said, releasing Clint’s hand. “I will not break.”

He was right, although Clint tried to take his time in working his fingers in against the tightness, stroking slowly, finding the right place and the right angle and the right pressure to make Loki arch up against him with sharp gasps. He tried to keep his focus as he pressed inward, watching Loki’s face, but Loki laughed breathlessly. 

“Take what you want, little Hawk. That’s why we’re here.”

With that permission granted Clint let the control slip away and thrust in hard, hearing the sharp sound it drew from Loki but knowing that Loki was not asking him to stop, and would not expect him to. He drove in again, reaching his hands up to find Loki’s wrists and pin them to the bed, resting his forehead against Loki’s chest to feel him breathing hard against him, to hear the low moans. He caught himself again, slowed his pace. 

“Don’t…” Loki protested. 

“This is what I want.”

“It’s not enough…”

Clint drew back, slid in again, making sure Loki felt every part of it. “It will be.”

Loki twisted beneath him but said nothing else, except a few muttered curses in an unfamiliar language. Time seemed to have stopped, or at least wandered off somewhere else for the moment, and for Clint there was nothing but Loki’s body under him and tight around his cock, Loki’s gasping breath and his own breath burning in his chest, and the control. His control. Finally, someone either trusted him enough to let him have it, or else just didn’t care what he was going to do with it, and either way, right now it was the same. 

“Please…” Loki managed, digging his fingers into Clint’s arms. “Please.”

And that was what he needed to hear. He reached down, wrapped a hand around Loki’s cock, and stroked it hard in time with his thrusts as he picked up his pace, rocking their bodies together until Loki shouted and arched against him, and the feeling of his cock pulsing in Clint’s hand and his body on fire against him sent his own release slamming into him with relentless force that left him seeing flashes of light and shadow. 

 

 

For what might have been a long time, but probably wasn’t, they lay slumped and tangled together, Clint’s head on Loki’s chest, Loki’s fingers running through Clint’s damp hair. The room was silent, without the steady and barely perceptible motion of the air conditioning system that was always running in the tower. Clint kept his eyes closed and tried not to think, not to do anything that might make this end, but the words escaped him anyway. 

“It can’t be like this, can it. I mean… not really.”

“No,” Loki said quietly, still stroking his hair, and his voice was low and solemn. “It cannot. Where I go, chaos and ruin follow. Pain and betrayal follow. It is my nature.”

Clint had a sudden flash of Thor’s face, his broad smile vanishing into hurt and confusion. He gritted his teeth and forced the image away. 

“It doesn’t have to be.”

“What?”

“You have choices. We all have choices.”

“True,” Loki said, running a hand down his neck. “But mine, even the best-intended ones, are unfailingly wrong. And unfailingly, someone suffers. What about the choices you make, little Hawk?”

Clint shook his head. “I don’t know. Sometimes, it seems like all I do is damage.”

“You fear you will hurt your teammates, even though you don’t want to.”

“I know I will.”

“Then when I say it is my nature to destroy the things I love, you know in your heart that you understand.”

“Yeah,” Clint said quietly. “I do. And that’s why it can’t ever really be like this.”

“No,” Loki sighed. “But I must admit that I do not wish to stop pretending that it could be.”

“Well, if it’s all going to go to hell anyway, does it matter what we pretend until then?”

Loki smiled. “I suppose not.”

“What happens if Frigga gives Thor what he’s asking for and…”

“She will not grant his request.”

“Why not?”

“It isn’t his request to make,” Loki said. “If you wished protection from me and asked for it yourself, she would grant it. But it’s not Thor’s place to ask for you.”

Clint closed his eyes again. “I can’t stay too long. The team will come looking for me.”

“I will return you to them as soon as you wish.”

“Actually, I think I’d rather you just gave me some of that magic money and let me take a cab,” Clint said, propping himself on his elbow. “Traveling your way makes me sick to my stomach.”

“One becomes accustomed to it,” Loki said, looking up at him. “You’ll be back?”

“I’d say no, but you’d know I was lying.”

“I will look for you in the park where I found you today,” Loki said, pulling him back down to kiss him. “Perhaps this time you can manage to avoid being followed.”

“I’ll try. Natasha’s pretty good.”

Loki reached for his jeans and pulled a handful of bills out of the pocket. “You could stay if you wished.”

“If I stay, I’m going to start thinking about things, and that’s probably bad for both of us.”

“And if you leave?”

“I think better when I’m alone.”

“Fair enough,” Loki said. “What will your team say?”

“That I’m psychologically damaged and you’re exploiting it.”

“Are they right?”

“Maybe,” Clint said, sitting up and reaching for his shirt. “Does it matter?”

“Not to me. And not to you.”

“Then it’s not really relevant, is it?”

 

 

He was in trouble, he thought, as he waved to the taxi that turned the corner. A lot of trouble. The kind of trouble that was going to make a lot of bad things happen. The kind of trouble that was going to frustrate and infuriate everyone who was trying to help him. Being in that kind of trouble again felt like coming home, like standing on solid ground after a long time at sea. If there was nothing else in the world he could trust, he could always trust his ability to fuck everything up. At least it was familiar. 

 

 

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	23. Chapter 23

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> While the rest of the team questions Loki's motives, Bruce is the one who gets a chance to question Clint's. Which is good, because Bruce is the only one who isn't likely to get punched in the face for it. 
> 
> .  
> .  
> .

Clint knew that JARVIS would have announced his arrival as soon as he stepped into the building, so he knew that his chances of grabbing a sandwich and disappearing to his room before someone came looking for him were slim. He heard the elevator doors slide open, but kept his eyes on the slices of cheese he was neatly stacking on his bread.

He expected a question about where he’d been or whether he was okay, but instead there was silence.

“You came up here just to stand there and watch me make a sandwich?”

“No,” Bruce said. “Not sure what I’m supposed to say, though, so I figured I’d give it a minute.”

Clint exhaled slightly; he’d been expecting Natasha, and he knew she’d be angry.

“They decided you should be the one to come and have a talk with me, huh?”

“I guess,” Bruce said, and Clint heard him settling down on the couch. “It was kind of a default thing. Natasha wanted to do it but she knew you’d just fight with her, and Tony avoids having any kind of serious conversation any time he can, and Steve can’t even start to figure out why you’d want the kind of things you want or put yourself in the kind of situations you do…”

“And Thor’s gone,” Clint said, picking up his sandwich and leaning against the counter.

“Even if he wasn’t, I don’t think it’d be a good thing right now,” Bruce said.

“Why? Because he’s so busy trying to protect me that he had to run off to Asgard without even asking me whether I wanted to be protected or not?”

“We told him he should wait,” Bruce said. “Apparently demigods have a stubborn streak. Go figure.”

“Yeah. Go figure.”

“Look… he’s always seemed like one of the most reasonable and calm ones around here, even with the whole God of Thunder thing. But he’s not calm or reasonable about Loki coming for you. Maybe he thought that after he took you and brought you back he’d be done, or maybe he was willing to put up with it because Loki talked Frigga into healing you, but when he found out he’d been at the testing facility…”

“He decided I needed to be protected,” Clint said. “It’s not going to work.”

“No?”

“Loki said Thor can’t make that request for someone else. I’d have to make it myself, and I’m not going to, because I don’t have to.”

“You can sit down, you know.”

Clint thought about it, but Bruce hadn’t asked him anything he didn’t want to answer yet and he wasn’t pushing, so he walked over and sat down on the couch, legs crossed, chewing on his sandwich.

“You’re not going to ask if I’m okay and what happened and everything?”

“I’m sure I’m supposed to,” Bruce said, shrugging. “But you look okay, and I don’t figure you’re going to tell me anything unless you feel like it anyway. So I guess I’m doing a pretty lousy job, considering that’s what they sent me in here to find out.”

“Nothing happened.”

“That’s the story you want to go with, that’s fine with me,” Bruce said. “But something changed between when you left here and when you got back. You don’t have to tell me what it is. But you know other people are going to be a little more demanding about getting some answers, even if it’s in the name of team security.”

Clint rolled his eyes. “I’m pretty good at keeping my secrets if I feel like it.”

“Everybody knows you are,” Bruce said. “And nobody wants to push you further away by trying to force the issue…”

“But they will.”

Bruce looked at him, and Clint found that he couldn’t look back.

“You can’t tell me that Loki isn’t trying to isolate you from us.”

“I don’t know what he’s trying to do.”

He jumped slightly as Bruce’s hand came to rest on his knee.

“Clint… I don’t want to lose you.”

Clint glanced at him. “Why not? Wouldn’t it be a lot easier if you just had to deal with Tony and not with me, too?”

“You think that’s all this is? Dealing with you?” Bruce retorted, and Clint was surprised at the anger in his voice. “You think I’m just putting up with you? You think that’s really how I deal with people? I mean, you can think what you want about the rest of the team, because I’m not going to speak for them, but fuck, Clint… you’re wrong.”

Clint stood up, tossed what was left of his sandwich on the table, and walked toward the elevator. Behind him, Bruce sat in silence and watched him go. The elevator doors slid open as he approached, but he stopped before he stepped in.

“You got nothing else to say?” he asked.

“If Loki’s already got you believing that we don’t give a shit about you, there’s nothing else to say.”

He could have turned and thrown something back in Natasha’s face, in Tony’s, even in Thor’s, but all the things he was ready to say to Bruce crashed to the floor unspoken, and he sighed and lowered his head.

“Can we go somewhere else, where everybody isn’t listening?”

“Yeah,” Bruce said. “We can do that. I…”

“Outside the tower. I know you can order JARVIS to shut off the cameras but I know Tony can order them back on.”

“I’ll get my coat. Where are we going?”

“I don’t know. Somewhere with something to eat. That stupid fancy cheese Tony gets makes lousy sandwiches. And I don’t want Natasha tracking us. I’m with Bruce and I’m pretty sure he’s one of your certified and approved babysitters anyway, right?”

Bruce glanced up at the ceiling. “JARVIS?”

“Agent Romanov states that Dr. Banner is not a babysitter and that if Agent Barton wishes to get into trouble he has demonstrated that he is capable of doing so with or without her monitoring.”

Clint shook his head. “I told her not to follow me in the first place.”

“She’s worried about you,” Bruce said.

“Everybody’s always worried about me.”

“Maybe that’s because there’s usually a reason to be.”

Clint shrugged. “Go get your coat. I’m hungry.”

 

 

 

“So… do we know anything?” Steve asked.

Natasha, sitting on one of the desks in Tony’s lab with her legs tucked under her, shook her head. “Not enough. But I don’t like it.”

“What’s to like?” Tony asked, pulling on a pair of gloves for some reason that he hadn’t made clear to the others. “Loki wants to drive him away from us, and he’s doing it by convincing him that all we do is babysit him and try to fix him.”

“Which is…”

“What, totally off-base?” Tony interrupted, ignoring Natasha’s glare. “Come on. Seriously. When we first ended up together as a team, Clint was pretty badly broken, and he’s not the only one with issues, but he’s the one whose issues were going to get him killed. He likes stuff that’s bad for him and we’ve been trying to keep him away from it.”

“What else are we supposed to do?” Natasha demanded. “I’m not just going to lose my partner like that. He deserves to have someone fight for him.”

“And that’s not what we’ve all been doing?” Steve asked her. “I mean, I may not know how to… but I know Tony and Bruce and Thor have tried…”

Natasha relented. “I know you have. All of you.”

“Yeah, but that’s the thing,” Tony said. “That’s Loki’s key into Clint’s head. We’ve been trying to help him. Loki turns that into him being a burden and us thinking he’s weak and needs taken care of. We’ve been trying to keep him part of the team, make him understand that he’s important. Loki turns that into us trying to convince him that he’s not a liability even though we all think he is. And I don’t think it’s any of us, or Bruce, that are the buttons Loki’s pushing the hardest.”

“Thor,” Natasha sighed. “But he’s been… Clint’s needed him. And Thor cares about him. I mean, more than just…”

“Yeah. I know. And I think if Clint didn’t feel the same way, at least a little bit, he wouldn’t be so pissed off that Thor left without telling him, and he wouldn’t have gone looking for Loki to take the hurt away.”

“Shit,” Natasha muttered. “I mean, it seems obvious that Thor’s the one Loki wants to hurt the most, but he’s going to break Clint and the team to do it.”

“Nobody told Thor to go running off to Asgard when we needed him here,” Steve said, crossing his arms. “I think we all told him not to. He didn’t listen. Even I get enough of what’s going on around here to know that Thor being gone leaves a big hole that Loki can step right through and get to what’s going to hurt Clint the most.”

“That the person he’s been willing to trust the most, in the most intimate ways...”

“Has just been pretending it mattered to him so he could get Clint fit for duty and keep him out of trouble?” Tony asked.

“If you’re Loki, why stop there?” Steve pointed out. “He can put it in Clint’s head that it’s never been about Clint at all.”

“That Thor’s just been using him as one little toy in a game he and Loki have been playing for their entire lives,” Natasha said. “That Thor’s end game is Loki and that Clint was a tool to get there. But Clint should know better…”

“Unless there’s some truth in it,” Tony said. “I mean, I’m not saying that Thor’s not crazy about Clint, because he obviously is. But isn’t is possible that part of why he’s so protective of Clint is because Clint’s something Loki wants, and Thor doesn’t want him to have it? They’re brothers. They’ve been at this a long time. Clint just walked into the game. What happens when he’s not in it anymore? Do they find something else to fight over?”

Natasha scowled. “We’ve made this way too fucking easy for Loki. Thor running off to Asgard like he did was just the opportunity he knew was coming. He knew he could push Thor into doing something stupid and pushing Clint away. We’ve given him everything he needs.”

“Not everything,” Steve said. “We haven’t given up. If we give up and let Loki have him, that’s the final proof he needs that we never cared anyway.”

“But if we fight to get him back we’re just proving that we think he needs a babysitter and can’t make his own decisions,” Tony said.

“Then we’ll have to figure out a way to not be assholes about it,” Natasha said. “All of us.”

 

 

 

“So,” Bruce said, after the waitress had taken their order and walked away, leaving them alone in their quiet booth at the back of the diner. “How was it?”

Clint looked at him with some confusion. “What?”

“You know what.”

“Umm…”

He’d expected questions on this topic, but not that question. Bruce laughed.

“Sorry. Just curious.”

Bruce would have made a good agent, if it wasn’t for the whole Hulk thing, Clint thought.

“Different,” he said.

“Different from what?”

“Different than I thought it would be.”

Bruce nodded. “I guess that with Loki being Loki, it would have been weirder if things had gone the way you expected.”

“I don’t know what I expected. But not…”

“He didn’t hurt you,” Bruce noted.

“No. It wasn’t… that’s not what it was about.”

“I thought that’s what everything between you two was about.”

“So did I,” Clint said, looking up as the waitress set down their drinks and waiting till she turned away before continuing. “Now I don’t know. I think his goal is to make sure I never know exactly what the hell is going on.”

“But you keep going back.”

Clint met his eyes. “Yeah. And I’m going to. Until…”

“Until what?”

“Until I figure it out. What he wants. What I want that makes me… I need to know. Nobody has answers for me, except maybe him. I don’t know if he has them either, but…”

  
“Whatever he’s telling you about us…”

“Stop,” Clint said, holding up his hand. “Just… don’t. I don’t need to be told what to think.”

“You don’t even know what I was going to say,” Bruce pointed out mildly.

Clint crossed his arms. “Fine. What?”

“Whatever he’s telling you about us… whether it’s true or not… will you at least give us credit for doing the best we knew how? I mean, it’s not like anyone gave any of us an instruction manual before they threw us all together. So if we’ve fucked something up, and he knows it, that’s fine, but will you at least try to remember that everything we’ve done has been what we thought was right?”

Clint leaned back and looked at the ceiling; he’d been ready to argue as soon as someone started telling him Loki was filling his head with lies, ready to be angered by the assumption that he was gullible enough to let his head be filled with lies. This wasn’t what he’d been prepared for, and it hit him with a strange twist in his stomach.

“I know.”

“Thor wasn’t thinking about anything except keeping you safe when he left,” Bruce said.

“Yeah, well… he didn’t ask me how I felt about that. And he’s been gone for a week.”

“We don’t even know what time is like in Asgard,” Bruce said. “And like I said… he was only thinking about one thing, and that was keeping you safe. He knows what Loki can do and it scares him. He thinks Loki’s playing games with you to try to get to him.”

“He might be,” Clint admitted. “But…”

Bruce raised his eyebrows. “It doesn’t feel that way, does it?”

“I’ve made it through a lot of bad things by listening to my instincts,” Clint said. “Natasha’s the planner, not me. That’s why…”

“Why you two aren’t together anymore.”

“Yeah. Among other reasons.”

“What do you think Thor’s going to say when he finds out this is happening… and it’s going to keep happening?”

“I don’t need a guilt trip…”

“It’s a reasonable question, Clint. I’ve been pretty laid-back about the interrogation thing, but Thor is part of the team and he’s our friend too, and I have a right to care about how this is going to affect people other than you.”

Somehow, the idea that Bruce might be concerned about someone other than him, that there might be other team members besides him that people had reasons to be concerned about, eased the anger that the question had sparked.

“He’ll… be pissed off, I’m sure.”

“Give me a little more to go on, Clint.”

Clint’s shoulders slumped as he surrendered. “He’ll be hurt. He won’t understand why he can’t answer all those questions for me.”

“He’s going to feel pretty shitty that he disappeared off to Asgard and left the door wide open for you to go looking for something else,” Bruce said. “I’m not saying that’s what happened… but that’s how he’s going to see it. That if he’d been here you wouldn’t have needed Loki. And Tony and I would be wondering it too, except that we know neither of us are willing to play that game at the level you need to play at, and we understand that.”

“I’d have gone looking for Loki no matter what Thor did,” Clint said.

“Yeah, but you can’t tell me that him going off to play defender of your virtue without asking you first didn’t piss you off enough to push you in that direction.”

Clint tried not to laugh. “Okay. It helped. Probably a lot.”

“What’s going to happen if he comes back and tells you that you’ve got to choose between him and his brother?”

The smile vanished. “Nobody makes my choices for me. I don’t belong to Thor.”

“No, but he’s pretty fond of you.”

“That’s not my problem,” Clint muttered, as the waitress set down a cheeseburger and fries in front of him and a salad in front of Bruce.

“What if Fury told you that Loki was a risk to the team, or to the world, and that as an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. you couldn’t have anything to do with him?”

“Fuck S.H.I.E.L.D.”

“You’re willing to give it all up? Everything you worked for? All of us? For someone who may or may not even bother to be around tomorrow?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“If this keeps going this way, you may end up having to make that choice,” Bruce said. “And honestly, I’d be pretty fucking disappointed if you and I didn’t have something that was worth at least trying to hold onto, not to mention you and Natasha, you and…”

“Enough,” Clint said, staring at his food. “I get it.”

“No, you don’t,” Bruce said, and when Clint looked up he was startled to see a flash of green behind the steady brown eyes. “You don’t get it. I’m telling you that I’m willing to fight for you. Whatever it takes. If that’s what it comes down to. You make your own choices, you do what you need to do… but if you think for one minute that I’m just going to let this asshole walk into our lives and try to take you out of it without a fight, you should know that’s not going to happen.”

He grabbed Clint’s hand before Clint could pull it away, and Clint could only stare back at him.

“You get it now?”

“Yes.”

“If you leave, it will hurt us. All of us. So if you’re going to leave, you’re going to understand what that’s going to do to us before you go.”

“I didn’t say I was leaving,” Clint said, his hand tightening around Bruce’s.

“I don’t think you can have this both ways, Clint.”

“Then you’re going to have to give me time to figure it out. I told you. There are things I need to understand, and Loki’s the only one with the answers.”

“Are you sure he’s got your answers, Clint?”

“I don’t know. But I need time to find out.”

Bruce nodded slowly. “Is that what you want me to tell the team? That you have questions, and Loki might be your only chance to get the answers, and that the only thing we can do is back off and try to understand and hope that in the end it brings you back to the people who really care about you?”

“Yeah,” Clint said. “You can tell them that.”

“That’s not what they want to hear.”

“Well, it’s that or I tell them all to fuck off.”

“First option’s probably better,” Bruce said, picking up his fork. “You gonna eat that? I thought you were hungry.”

“It was you they sent to talk to me for a reason, wasn’t it.”

“Like I said, it was kind of by default. You know, it’s almost weird to eat a meal without having someone stealing food off your plate.”

“That’s only Tony, and he only does it to you.”

Bruce smiled fondly. “I know. I kind of like it.”

 

.


	24. Chapter 24

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> While the team tries to figure out how to get Thor back to deal with his brother, Clint is finding out that Loki doesn't have all the answers either, and that he might be even more confused than Clint is, which is probably really dangerous for everyone involved. 
> 
> .  
> .  
> .

“So where’s Clint now?” Natasha asked.

“Agent Barton has been at the archery range practicing since he returned from his excursion with Dr. Banner,” JARVIS replied.

Natasha nodded. “Good. He’s always thinking better when he’s been training.”

Bruce looked across the conference table. “I don’t really like sitting in here like we’re having a meeting about him and I’m supposed to be giving the presentation.”

“It’s just for privacy,” Steve said. “This is the one room in the building that Tony and Natasha both confirm is completely blocked from any outside interference or eavesdropping, even by Fury. And this isn’t really something we think Fury needs to be in on at this point.”

“I’d have to agree with you on that one,” Bruce said.

“I disagree,” Tony broke in.

Natasha rolled her eyes. “You think Fury needs to know that Clint has for some unknown reason decided that it’s a good idea to go off and… do whatever he’s doing? I mean, what are they doing, Bruce?”

“You saw what he looked like when he came back here earlier,” Bruce said.

“Hair all a mess, clothes looking like they’d been off him and on the floor?” Tony asked. “I know what it looks like to me.”

“Bruce?” Natasha asked.

“He did give me permission to talk about some of it but I don’t know about that…”

“Then you can just tell him we’re not stupid and we figured it out for ourselves. They’re fucking, right?”

“If you want to put it that way…” Bruce said, glancing at Steve, whose face had started to turn red as soon as Tony mentioned clothes that looked like they’d been on the floor.

“So we’re supposed to let Fury in on that?” she asked.

“That’s not what I said,” Tony argued.

“You said you thought Fury needed to be in on…”

“I think he does. Because he has something we don’t… he has a way to get in touch with the Asgardians. If Thor’s gone for a month like he was last time, that’s way too much time for Loki to work on Clint. Fury doesn’t need to know what’s going on between those two… but if we let him know that Loki is playing games and that he tricked Thor into leaving so he could mess things up while he was gone, Fury can help us get Thor back here before Loki gets any deeper into Clint’s head than he already is. And at the moment, until we get Thor back, Loki’s got a big open door he can keep walking right through.”

Bruce glanced at Natasha. “Tony’s right. I know Fury’s going to read between the lines and get some idea what Loki’s trying to do with Clint, but we have no idea how long Thor might be gone… if he’s off trying to persuade his parents to do something Clint says they won’t do anyway because it’s not Thor’s place to ask them to…”

“He might be gone a while,” Tony said. “And having him gone is making it too easy for Clint to buy what Loki’s selling.”

“Clint’s not…” Natasha interrupted.

“I know he’s smart,” Tony said. “But everybody has times in their life where they don’t have all the answers, right? Times when you question all the decisions you’ve made, question everyone around you, wonder whether you’ve been headed in the wrong direction all this time… and if you catch someone right at that moment when they’re standing on that fence, they could be the smartest person on the fucking planet, and they’ll still be ready to listen to anyone who seems like they’ve got the answers.”

“Personal experience?” Bruce asked.

“Something like that,” Tony said. “I’m not saying Clint’s not smart. I’m saying he’s been through a lot and some of it was some shit that had to make him question who he is and what he’s doing and what the hell is going on in this world, and when you’re at that place, a guy like Loki is offering the one thing you need most…”

“Answers,” Bruce said. “That’s what Clint said he needed from Loki. Answers. And he couldn’t stop until he got them.”

“That’s pretty much where I was when Clint found me,” Natasha said. “I guess I’m lucky he’s the one who was there.”

“He knows we’re here,” Bruce said. “I think he knows how much he means to the team, and how much he means to each of us. But Tony’s right… Thor being gone is a hole we can’t fill. This game… Loki may not even think it’s about Thor. He may really believe it’s about him and Clint. But there’s no way, knowing Thor and Loki, that being able to hit Thor where it hurts isn’t at least somewhere in the equation.”

Natasha raised her eyebrows. “What would make you think that Loki actually believes this is about something between him and Clint?”

“Clint trusts his instincts,” Bruce said. “And I trust Clint. You said he’s not stupid. He’s not easy to fool. If Loki was blatantly playing him to get to Thor, Clint would know. I know Loki’s good enough to lie to Clint about other things but I don’t know if he’s good enough to trick Clint into believing he has feelings for him that he doesn’t have. Clint’s smart enough to see through that, even from Loki.”

 

“Yeah,” she said quietly. “He is. He told you he thinks Loki really has… some kind of feelings for him?”

Bruce nodded.

“Then Tony is right, and we need Thor back here immediately. Even if it means giving Fury more hints than I want to,” she said. “I’ll get him on the phone as soon as he’s available.”

“Did someone actually admit that I was right about something?” Tony asked.

“Don’t push your luck,” Bruce said, elbowing him. “What do the rest of us do until Thor gets back?”

Natasha glanced at Steve. “What’s your call?”

Steve took a deep breath. “Okay. Leaning on Clint and making him feel like we’re the enemy is exactly what Loki wants us to do. But if we let him get too far away, we may not be able to get him back. There’s a balance somewhere, but I don’t know where it is. Just… don’t push him. Let him know that we trust him and that whatever else he’s… whatever else is going on, we’re a team, and he’s part of it. I don’t know what else to do.”

Natasha sighed. “JARVIS, is Clint still at the archery range?”

“Yes, ma’am. He has been testing and adjusting all of his bows and he requested that I give you the message that he feels that it has been much too long since there has been Chinese food for dinner, and that when you are finished having your meeting about what to do with him, you should proceed with ordering some.”

 

 

 

Clint was quiet but unsettlingly normal during the usual dinner-eating, TV-watching evening time. He sat in his usual spot with his feet on the coffee table and tossed out an occasional comment on how obvious it was that the archers in “The Lord of the Rings” weren’t even shooting real arrows and they were just adding them in later with computer graphics, even though everyone already knew that because they’d all watched this movie enough times before. Nobody complained; Tony and Bruce threw fits about the same thing when it was tech stuff, and Natasha usually had something unflattering to say about the directors of any spy movie they put on. Even Steve couldn’t help but nit-pick the inaccuracies of any movie set in the decades before he was frozen. The only person who seemed to generally think that all movies were excellent, even the worst ones, was noticeably absent.

The only person who didn’t seem to have a regular seat was Tony, who couldn’t stay in one spot for very long no matter what they were watching. He usually migrated from perching on the back of the couch to wandering off to the kitchen and eventually ended up either stretched out with his head on Bruce’s lap or lounging with his legs across Clint’s thighs. Tonight he meandered back in from the kitchen and flopped down beside Clint and settled into his usual position without a word. Bruce and Natasha shared a quick glance, but Clint just absently settled back and muttered something about Tony’s smelly feet, and Bruce pointed out that perhaps if it occurred to Tony that he was a billionaire and could afford new socks occasionally this might not be an issue, and Clint chuckled and suggested pouring the remaining soy sauce from dinner into Tony’s shoes to see if that improved the situation.

  
“He seems… pretty normal,” Steve said, as he and Natasha stepped into the elevator, leaving the others to finish their movie.

She shook her head. “He’s playing normal. I know Clint. He knows this game.”

“You think…”

“He’ll be out tomorrow,” she said. “Out looking for Loki, and I’m sure he’ll find him.”

“Did you talk to Fury?”

“Yeah. And he’s going to contact Asgard and tell them we’ve got a Loki issue and we need Thor back here to help us deal with it… but he knew it was about Clint. I don’t know if he’s been in our systems again or…”

“It wasn’t a hard guess to make.”

“No. I’d have been more surprised if Fury didn’t know about it. But this is a fine line. Loki is an enemy and he’s an escaped war criminal. Fury may be willing to sit on this, at least until Thor gets back, but if anyone else finds out…”

“Intel,” Steve said. “Didn’t Clint say he wanted answers? And didn’t you tell me that agents operating at the level you and Clint are at are allowed to use unconventional tactics to obtain information?”

“Unconventional is the formal term,” she said. “Highly questionable might be a better one.”

“Either way. Until further notice, that’s what Clint’s doing. And in case anyone is eavesdropping or poking their noses into things, that’s how we need to refer to it.”

“We’re not fooling anyone.”

“Maybe not, but we might as well try.”

 

 

 

Clint wasn’t surprised when he stepped into the elevator the next morning and found Natasha already waiting for him there. It was ridiculously early enough to avoid anyone else on the team except possibly Steve, who would already be off training, but he knew perfectly well that it wasn’t just coincidental timing that she was standing there, eyeing the winter coat and the wool hat and the backpack over his shoulder.

“Going out?”

“Looks like it, doesn’t it?”

“What’s in the bag?”

He grinned. “A couple of different hats. Another coat. A scarf.”

“Mmm-hmm. Planning to lose someone?”

“Only if I think I’m being followed.”

“You’re assuming I was planning on following you?”

He shrugged. “You did last time.”

“I got the hint. You and Loki don’t want to be followed, he’ll make it so I can’t follow you.”

“Still better to be prepared,” he said, nodding to the backpack.

The elevator stopped, and they stepped out into the empty hallway that served as the team’s private exit from the building, away from the offices and lobbies. Clint watched her for a moment.

“If you were going to follow me you probably wouldn’t have given it away that you knew I was leaving,” he said.

“Will you trust me if I tell you I’m not following you this time?”

“No,” he said.

She blinked. “Clint.”

“No, because you’ll justify it in your head that I’m not thinking right, that Loki’s gotten to me and I don’t know what I’m doing and it’s your job to protect me. When we were out on ops, you trusted me. Even if it looked to everyone on the outside like I’d totally lost track of my mission and maybe even turned to the other side, you trusted me. But you don’t trust me now.”

She lowered her head. “Loki isn’t like anything we’ve ever dealt with together, Clint. And we’re not dealing with him together. You’re doing this alone. And when we were out on ops, I was always afraid of losing you, and I still am, and I’m afraid Loki might be the thing I can’t pull you back from.”

She was surprised to feel Clint’s hand on her cheek.

“I’m coming back, Tasha. I’m not as far gone as you think I am. I promise, I’m coming back.”

“Why do you have to go?” she demanded. “He doesn’t have anything for you, Clint.”

“Yeah, he does.”

“What?”

“The answer to why he’s still in my head.”

He traced her face lightly with his fingers, then turned and pushed open the door, letting in a blast of cold air. Natasha watched until the door had closed and the chill had started to dissipate before she turned back to the elevator.

“JARVIS?”

“Yes, ma’am?”

“Erase all footage of Agent Barton from the time he left his room this morning until now.”

“Mr. Stark…”

“It’s okay,” she said. “The team will know he’s gone. I just don’t need anyone else knowing it unless they have to.”

 

 

 

Clint had the taxi driver drop him off a few blocks from the old hotel and started walking, just to make sure he could look around and spot anyone who might have trailed him in the cab. After a few minutes of watching cars and people go by, he decided that either Natasha had decided not to follow him or his tactics had successfully shaken her off.

He’d walked less than a block toward his destination when a familiar figure in a leather jacket fell into step beside him.

“Agent Barton.”

“I thought you weren’t calling me that anymore.”

“I didn’t know if the permission to use a more personal form of address extended past your last visit,” Loki said.

“I’ll tell you if I change my mind.”

They walked in silence for a few minutes.

“You’re shivering,” Loki observed.

“It’s cold.”

“I see. I had noticed that this appears to be a temperature most humans find highly unpleasant. Exposure to such cold is harmful to you?”

“Only if you’re exposed for too long and don’t have a way to get warmed up,” Clint said. “We have to maintain our body temperature within a pretty narrow range or our brains don’t function properly, and then our bodies start shutting down.”

“I will make sure to warm you properly when we reach our destination,” Loki said, and there was a smirk in his voice that irritated Clint.

“You so sure I want you to?”

“I assumed there was a reason you came back.”

“If you think I can’t get laid somewhere else, you apparently haven’t met my team,” Clint retorted. “And if you think you’re that great…”

“I’m sure I can hardly compare to my brother’s talents…” Loki said, rolling his eyes.

“I thought he wasn’t your brother.”

Loki glanced at him. “You know our story. I called him brother long enough that it would be difficult to remember to call him something else.”

“So you’ll call him your brother, but you’ll still try to kill him?”

Loki stopped and studied him for a long moment. “Why are you so angry, little Hawk?”

“I don’t know,” Clint said. “I’m waiting for you to turn around and make me feel as stupid for trusting you as you made Thor for letting you live when he had the chance to finish you.”

Loki smiled slightly. “Much as my brother may think he has had the upper hand in our battles, there has never been a time he could have finished me off as easily as he wishes to think. How many times did people assume they were about to put an end to you, Agent Barton? How many times have you looked down the barrel of a gun, felt a knife at your throat, heard the executioner coming down the hall, and somehow managed to walk away?”

“More times than anyone knows about,” Clint said.

“Did you come here today to argue with me?”

“I don’t know why I came. I don’t know why I’m here. I don’t know what I think you’re going to tell me that I don’t already know. But I’m still here.”

Loki chuckled. “Then come with me, and come out of the cold, and search for whatever brought you here.”

 

 

 

And within what seemed like a very short time Clint was staring at the faded wallpaper in Loki’s room, feeling the demigod’s naked body pressed against his back, his skin burning through the lingering chill and his lips on Clint’s neck and shoulders igniting bursts of heat.

“You don’t seem so eager today, little Hawk.”

Clint stared ahead and said nothing. He felt Loki move away, heard him reaching for something, and then suddenly he was pressing him face-down into the bed, too strong and too quick for Clint to do anything about it, and his arms were dragged above his head and bound tightly with cloth to the head of the bed. Clint jerked back, testing the knots, testing the strength of the body above him, but neither one yielded. He slumped to the bed, muscles tense, alarms ringing through his head, but at the same time a rush of excitement shooting through his gut and settling lower, tingling and alive.

“That’s better, isn’t it,” Loki murmured, pressing his lips against the skin behind Clint’s ear. “This is what you came for.”

“I can pay a cheap hooker to tie me to a bed,” Clint muttered, but he knew his voice betrayed him; even he could hear the need in it.

“Are you afraid?”

The question came not as a challenge, but almost soothingly.

Clint nodded.

“Good,” Loki whispered, his weight still pinning Clint down. “That’s what you want, isn’t it. You know my brother will never harm you. You know I might, don’t you?”

Another small nod.

“And that’s what you came here for. To see if you still need the fear. To see if it can still give you what nothing else can. To find out whether you can live with your team and their trust and their safe words… and live without this. Can you live without this, little Hawk? Answer me.”

“I don’t know.”

“You want me to hurt you, don’t you. You want me to prove to you that you cannot trust me. You want me to prove that you should fear me, that you have reason to fear me.”

Clint twisted against the knots binding his hands, but he couldn’t manage to put together any words. He felt Loki smile against his shoulder.

“I don’t have your answers, little Hawk. But I can give you what you need.”

 

 

Clint found himself struggling back to the surface from under a heavy blanket of darkness. His body still didn’t seem to belong to him, but at least he could start to take stock of where he was and what was going on. He wasn’t sure why he’d been out; he could feel the stripes of pain across his back and the blood cooling and sticky against his sides and on the sheets underneath him, but he remembered it happening, and although it had been enough blood loss to make his consciousness slightly fuzzy around the edges it wasn’t nearly enough to put him unconscious. He remembered something wrapped around his neck and tightening as he was being fucked, but although it had reached the point of dizziness and wavering awareness, he clearly remembered the pressure released and gasping in deep breaths as the aftershocks of his orgasm rocked through him, so Loki had obviously known what he was doing, and it certainly wasn’t the first time Clint had played that game. He didn’t feel any pain in his head to make him think he’d been hit hard enough to put him out, and he seemed to clearly recall everything right up to a certain point, but his body still wasn’t responding to his brain’s commands.

He tried to trace back to the point where he stopped being able to remember; Loki had been frustrated, angry about something, and Clint had said something, but he didn’t know what.

He managed to convince his eyes to open and found himself in the same room, now lit only by the glow of street lights from outside. He could see Loki’s profile against the window, staring blankly at the brick wall of the building next door, and something told him he’d been sitting there a long time.

“What did you…” he attempted, although the words didn’t seem to come out properly.

Loki glanced over at him. “I quieted you so I could think. It isn’t permanent.”

Clint flexed his fingers, finding that his hands were no longer tied, and tried to move his head. “Why?”

“I told you. I wanted to think. You make that difficult.”

He shifted slightly, trying to get messages going to his muscles from his brain again, and the motion reminded him of a deep ache that he’d feel for days, but it wasn’t really any worse than anything he’d inflicted on himself trying to take too much of Thor too quickly. He was fairly certain by now that he remembered everything that had happened, and that meant that whatever Loki had been doing while Clint had been unconscious, he hadn’t touched him except to untie his hands.

“How long…”

“A few hours. You didn’t seem to be in distress. Humans bleed more than Asgardians, but it appeared to stop without any assistance, and you still had enough alertness left to be argumentative and difficult.”

“That’s why you shut me up.”

“Don’t,” Loki warned.

“No… I remember. Enough, at least.”

“Don’t, little Hawk,” he said, and there was something desperate in his voice.

“It was good for me,” Clint said, feeling the grin spread across his face even though he knew he was probably going to be sorry for it. “It wasn’t good for you, was it. What’s the matter? Couldn’t get turned on just from…”

“Stop.”

“Couldn’t take it any farther, could you. Couldn’t do it. You weren’t getting off on it like you expected to. You didn’t…”

“Silence,” Loki snapped.

He waved his hand sharply, and Clint was aware of nothing else until he became aware of cold pavement under his cheek, a few painful new bruises on his face that hadn’t been there before, and cold air seeping through his coat and biting at his bare feet as curious onlookers gathered around him. He heard a familiar voice, one that had pierced into his fogged mind on many missions even after he’d been drugged or tortured, and then he felt strong arms that had to be Steve’s scooping him up off the sidewalk, and he caught a brief, dizzy glimpse of Stark Tower rising above him into the night sky before his eyes wouldn’t stay open anymore.

 

 

He wanted to tell them it was all right, that he was fine, but he couldn’t, not yet. He did manage to get his eyes to open and his fingers to move, and realized that he was in his room and that Natasha was looking him over while the others stood uneasily against the wall.

“He’s awake,” Tony said.

Natasha looked up at his face and smiled. “Yeah, he is. Hi, Clint. Can you answer me?”

She slid her hand into his.

“You know the drill. Once for yes, twice for no. Are you aware of what’s going on?”

One squeeze to her hand.

“Okay. Did Loki do something to put you like this?”

Another squeeze.

“Is it going to go away on its own? Okay… can you tell me how long? Squeeze when I get it right… days? Hours? Okay. A few hours? Is it okay if we take care of you? You’ve got some injuries on your back that look to be from earlier today and they’re not bleeding but I’d like to cover them up so they don’t get infected. And… are there other injuries we need to know about, Clint?”

Two squeezes. No.

She sighed. “Okay. Steve, will you grab us a first aid kit? And maybe one of you other guys can get me a bowl of hot water so I can clean this dried blood off him.”

“What about his face?” Bruce asked, and there was a low anger there that made Clint turn his eyes to look at him; he wished he could tell him that none of it mattered and that everything was fine.

“He’s had worse things done to his face,” Natasha said, running her fingers very gently over the bruises. “I don’t think there are any broken bones or any serious trauma. I’m pretty sure Loki can hit a lot harder than this if he wants to. And these…”

Clint felt her fingers tracing the marks around his throat.

“These are superficial. If he’d intended to kill him, these ligature marks would be much deeper. Considering what we know Loki’s capable of, all of this is pretty superficial. He wasn’t really trying to hurt you, was he, Clint?”

He squeezed her hand again, twice. She nodded.

“You can tell us what happened when you can talk again,” she said. “Right now, we’re going to clean you up, and that’s going to make a mess of this bed, so we’ll move you to Bruce’s… is it okay if he and Tony stay with you till you start to come back? It’s three in the morning right now, but pretty soon Steve and I are going to need to do some damage control about why you suddenly appeared out thin air on the sidewalk with nothing on but jeans, a coat, and a lot of blood.”

Fury was not going to appreciate that, Clint thought.

“He smiled,” Bruce said, and some of the anger was gone from his voice.

“Not much makes Clint happier than pissing off his superiors,” Natasha said, touching his bruised cheek again. “Right now, just let us take care of you, and then Steve and I will take care of Fury, and then when you’re back to yourself we’ll figure out what to do about the rest of it.”

Clint managed a hint of a nod, but even that was exhausting, and he was more than willing to let himself slip back into a comfortable darkness as the others moved around him.

 

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	25. Chapter 25

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Despite the lingering effects of Loki's handiwork, Tony and Clint get to spend a little private time together... well, sort of private (it's only Bruce, after all, and maybe the Other Guy, a little bit). Natasha likes to have a plan, but before you can have a plan you have to know what you're dealing with. And it doesn't help if what you're dealing with is a compulsively lying demigod who's probably insane. 
> 
> .  
> .  
> .

Tony had his tablet propped up on a pillow and was tapping at it with one hand while the other hand rubbed absently over Clint’s head where it rested on his leg, Clint’s arm draped across his lap. Natasha had muttered something them about keeping their hands to themselves as she departed earlier, but Tony figured this was fair, since Clint was the one who’d gradually rolled himself toward Tony and curled up to him. On Clint’s other side, Bruce was sprawled out and sleeping; apparently he didn’t handle 3:00AM wake-ups well and had gone back to sleep as soon as Clint was safely installed in his room. 

“You can sleep too,” Clint murmured. “You don’t have to watch me.”

“You know I don’t sleep,” Tony said. “Well, not until someone forces me to or until I pass out from sleep deprivation. But I’m fine for the moment.”

Clint tried to raise his head to get a look at Tony’s tablet, but it seemed like a lot of effort. 

“Are you doing work?”

“Actually, I’m playing some kind of blowing-up-bridges game and being annoyed because the physics are completely wrong. But I could pretend to be doing work if that would make you feel better.”

Clint chuckled, and the hand that was draped across Tony’s lap reached up absently to rest on his hip. “I don’t care what you’re doing.”

“Your speech is clearer.”

“Yeah… it’s wearing off. I’m not sure how long it takes. I’m not sure how long I was out the first time he did it, and I was just starting to come out of it when he sent me back here.”

Tony made an irritated noise and shoved the tablet away. “Haven’t these morons ever heard of the laws of thermodynamics? And anyway, how did all this happen, out of curiosity? I mean, this isn’t really one of your kinks, last I checked…”

He traced the bruises on Clint’s face with careful fingers. 

“No. Getting hit in the face is usually strictly business.”

“Mmm. And if this is one of your kinks…”

He ran a finger along the reddened line that circled Clint’s throat. 

“Not really. I mean, it works… you know. Does what it’s supposed to do. But it’s not…”

“You didn’t ask him to do that?”

“No.”

“But you didn’t ask him to stop, either, which I’m assuming based on the fact that you never ask anyone to stop anything, whether you want it or not, because you’re a pain in the ass.”

Clint grinned. “Planning to have Bruce try it on you?”

“No.”

“It’s… a novelty. The novelty wore off a long time ago. Loki… it’s a control thing for him. Everything is a control thing for him. And for some reason, this thing with me is getting out of control, and he really doesn’t like it… which is why he did whatever he did to shut me up.”

“I’m sure you weren’t antagonizing him or anything.”

“Of course I was,” Clint said. “Why not? If he wants to kill me, he’ll kill me. But then he won’t get his answers. And as far as I can tell, he expected to really be enjoying having me at his mercy… and he’s not. And he doesn’t know why.”

Tony’s fingers were still running through Clint’s hair. “He’s probably dreamed about breaking you. You know, wiping you out of his head for good. If something is keeping him from sealing the deal now, that fucks up all his plans.”

Clint smiled. “I’m good at fucking up people’s plans.”

His hand on Tony’s hip squeezed, then moved to trace across the fabric of his shirt over his stomach. Tony twitched. 

“That tickles. What are you up to?”

Clint turned his head to look up at him. “I gotta spell it out for you?”

“Look, you’re still halfway under some kind of spell and you can hardly move, and you just got done getting punched in the face and choked and…”

“So?”

Tony considered this for a moment. “I guess if those things aren’t relevant to you, there’s no real reason they should be relevant to me. I mean, besides the whole common sense and keeping you from hurting yourself thing, but considering what you’ve been going and getting yourself into with Loki, you’ve pretty much thrown common sense and not hurting yourself out the window, so…”

“You can stop talking now.”

“Oh. Right. You want…”

Clint reached up and grabbed at Tony’s arm and tugged. “Come down here with me.”

Tony didn’t argue, and along the way he figured he might as well pull off his shirt to save Clint the trouble of continuing to tug at it to try to get rid of it. The arc reactor glowed blue between them as Tony hooked an arm around Clint’s waist and pulled him in and kissed him. Loki’s work on Clint might not have worn of completely, but it had worn off enough that Clint could return the kiss with plenty of heat and raise a hand to grip Tony’s hair as Tony’s hand slid down to his ass and drew their bodies closer together. Clint glanced down and chuckled. 

“Apparently some systems are fully functioning, at least.”

Tony grinned and ran his fingers along Clint’s cock. “Seems to be in proper working order. We’ll have to conduct a proper test, though. I am a scientist, you know.”

“What’d you have in mind?”

“I don’t know. What are you up for?”

“Everything,” Clint said, unhesitating. 

“You’re not getting everything from me,” Tony said. “I’m done with that game. Not even going to try. I like sex and I like you and I really like those things together but the rest of this stuff…”

“Tony… it’s fine. It really is. It doesn’t always have to be…”

Tony frowned. “I thought that was the only thing that…”

Clint’s eyes were dark and raw as they met Tony’s. “That was before.”

“Before…”

“Before there were other things,” Clint said, and kissed him hard enough to make sure there wasn’t any need for talking for a while, except for a few muttered questions and answers as Tony rolled Clint onto his back, careful not to dislodge Natasha’s carefully applied bandages even though Clint didn’t seem to feel them at all. 

“You sure this…”

“Yeah.”

“I can…”

“Just…”

Tony grabbed for some pillows to prop Clint’s hips up, since Clint’s usual impressive leg strength still hadn’t kicked back in yet. He didn’t really notice that one of the pillows he’d grabbed was from under Bruce’s head, but Bruce just blinked lazily, grinned, and reached for another one. Clint’s face was flushed from the effort of making his arms obey him and keeping his grip on Tony’s shoulders, but he clearly didn’t intend to let go.

“Clint, if this is going to wear you out or make things worse…”

Clint shook his head. “I don’t think it matters. Might as well feel good while I’m waiting.”

Tony lowered his head and mouthed over the marks on Clint’s throat. “Does that hurt?”

“I can’t even tell they’re there, Tony. Seriously. None of this is… it’s been worse. A lot worse. I don’t know why he… he could have done a lot more. He told me he was going to do a lot more. And then he…”

“Chickened out?” Tony asked. 

“Something,” Clint said. “I don’t think he could do it. I don’t think he was enjoying it like he expected to.”

“It really isn’t fun to hurt someone you care about,” Tony said, kissing his shoulder. 

“It is for some people,” Clint said. “But if you’re talking about just hurting someone to hurt them, having feelings for them definitely messes up the equation.”

“I think I’ll just stick with not hurting you, if I can help it,” Tony said. “And speaking of that, you look pretty… sore… you know…”

Clint grinned. “Like I said, it’s been worse. Just… take your time. And lots of lube.”

Tony chuckled and reached for the nightstand. “I can do that.”

 

 

 

Bruce was content to watch the two of them through nearly closed eyes; he wasn’t quite awake enough yet to be more than mildly interested, and considering that Clint could barely manage to hang onto one person he wasn’t sure he needed to be trying to handle two of them. He was fairly sure Clint knew perfectly well that he was awake, and quite sure Tony was too distracted to notice, but if Clint had, he obviously didn’t care. He’d managed to hook one heel over Tony’s leg and was trying to urge Tony to pick up the pace, but Tony shook his head and chuckled breathlessly. 

“No, no, no. I don’t get to do this all that often, you know. It’s no fun if it’s over in two minutes.”

Clint scowled. “You can do this pretty much any time you want.”

“Not like this,” Tony said, lowering his head to kiss him. 

“Why? Because I can’t cause any trouble?”

“Because you’re not tied up or handcuffed or blindfolded or fighting me or any of it. I don’t… this is better. I mean, I know for you…”

Clint squirmed and arched up as Tony slid back into him. 

“I’m not complaining, am I?” he asked, gripping the back of Tony’s neck. 

“No. Which is a little worrisome, because if you’re not complaining you’re usually planning something, and that’s…”

“Considering that right now I can’t stand up, I don’t have too much planned.”

“Is that the only reason you’re just staying here and letting me do this to you without the fighting or the cuffs or any of that?”

Clint looked up at him and grinned. “It feels good.”

“I didn’t think that was enough for you.”

“Do you always talk this much during sex?”

“Don’t change the subject. I can always leave you by yourself and roll over and wake up sleepyhead over there. What happened to this not being enough?”

“He’s awake,” Clint said. “And anyway... right now, it’s enough. It just is.”

“I’ll take that,” Tony said. “Bruce, how long have you been awake?”

Bruce smiled sleepily. “Since you yanked the pillow out from under my head to shove it under Clint’s ass. Which, by the way, I want clean pillowcases. I don’t want my face where somebody’s ass was.”

“But it’s such a nice ass,” Tony said, sliding a hand down to grab it. Clint made a noise that might have been a protest, but really wasn’t. 

“I agree,” Bruce said, yawning. “But it’s in use at the moment, and I’m not even conscious enough to be properly interested anyway, so I’m going back to sleep.”

Tony grinned. “I’ll bet I can make Clint make enough noise to keep you awake.”

Clint rolled his eyes. “Bet you can’t… oh, fuck!”

“A little sensitive in certain places?” Bruce asked sympathetically. 

“Not fair to take advantage of…”

Whatever the next word was supposed to be, it came out as moan. Bruce laughed and pulled his pillow over his head and let Tony get on with fucking Clint into the bed, content to be warm and comfortable next to them. He was even more content at the feeling of the Other Guy, who’d been on edge since Clint came back unconscious and bruised, stirring in his head, taking note of the situation, seeing that the two people he liked best were happy and taking care of each other, and settling back to wherever he went, reassured that everything was all right. 

 

 

 

Natasha could hear his quiet footsteps approaching the bench, hesitating, moving forward again. She huddled up in her gray wool coat as a gust of wind passed by, and people walking through the park on their way to other places shivered and turned up their collars against the chill. She waited, giving no sign that she knew he was there, letting him decide what to do. She’d been sitting there since just after dawn, had watched the hurry and scuttle of the lunch break crowds, and she was in no hurry now. 

After several minutes, she saw motion out of the corner of her eye. With her arms wrapped up in her jacket for warmth, her hand easily found the pistol at her waist. 

“Not who you were expecting?” she asked. 

“I wasn’t really expecting anyone,” Loki said. “Shall I sit, since I assume you were expecting me?”

She nodded at the bench beside her. Loki sat, looking out at the leafless trees on the other side of the path. As she studied him in profile, his face was sharp, knowing, and weary.

“What do you want?” he asked. 

“I like to know what I’m dealing with,” she said. 

“We have no business together, Agent Romanov.”

“Clint is my business.”

He smiled, but there was no humor in it. “Is that business, Agent Romanov, or personal?”

“I’m not playing this game with you. I just want to know what you want from Clint, and what we’re going to have to do to get you away from him.”

“Hmm. Does Agent Barton know that you’re here, trying to negotiate for his freedom from something he doesn’t seem to want free of? I believe that’s what my brother went running off to Asgard to do, and that doesn’t seem to have pleased our Hawk tremendously.”

“He’s not yours. No part of him is yours.”

“Except the part he gives willingly. Is that what makes you angry, Agent? That I don’t even have to use magic or trickery to take him away from you?”

“Is that what you want? You want him all to yourself, or do you just want to split up the team? Is this about taking what Thor has, or just about revenge in general?”

Loki turned his head and fixed her with bright green eyes. 

“Agent Romanov. Your assumption that there is both logic and malice behind my actions leads you astray. Did it ever occur to you that despite the damage that any of you may have suffered in our battle, no one lost more than I did? I lost my family, if I ever truly had them. I lost those who called themselves friends and allies. I became a criminal and a prisoner in my own realm, my powers stripped from me. I escaped before Thanos could find me; Asgard was the first place he would have looked. And yes, I could have gone anywhere. But there was only one place in all the nine realms where I knew I could find someone who would not turn away from me.”

“Clint has more reason to turn away from you than anybody else I can think of, except maybe the family members you’ve tried to kill.”

He sighed. “You won’t provoke me into speaking carelessly, Agent. No one knows the list of my crimes and trespasses better than I do. And I could tell you that I am different now, and that I no longer seek to destroy or to ruin, but I’m quite certain you wouldn’t believe me.”

“Have you ever seen a snake shed its skin?”

“I have. When the skin they wear no longer suits them, their eyes grow cloudy and their colors dull, and they free themselves of it.”

“A snake that sheds its old skin is still the same snake,” she said. “Shinier. With clearer vision. Still the same snake.”

“Some of us change in ways that force us to shed more than mere skin, Agent Romanov.”

She glanced at him. “You don’t have to tell me that. Do you know how many times I’ve had to reinvent myself, become someone totally new? The person you’re sitting here talking to… she didn’t exist before Clint found her. Like I told you before, I owe him a debt.”

“Would Agent Barton be pleased to know you’d come to speak to me?”

“You know he wouldn’t.”

“And you wish me to keep my silence.”

“I don’t care. I told you. I need to figure out what I’m dealing with before I decide how to deal with it. So I wanted to see your face and hear your voice.”

“Am I not the evil being you expected?”

“I’ve seen evil,” she said. “It doesn’t look like you.”

He cocked his head. “You think yourself very wise, for a creature with such a short lifespan and a limited understanding of the universe.”

“It’s got nothing to do with wisdom. Those of us who aren’t immortal learn how to survive. You… whatever you are… gods, aliens… you don’t have to worry about that so much. So maybe you’re wise. Maybe you know about a lot of things that humans haven’t even started to figure out yet. But if you and your brother are anything to go by, there’s a lot of stuff you don’t know a damn thing about.”

Loki smiled. “If you could meet my mother…”

Natasha sat up. “She’s the one who healed Clint when you took him away. Frigga.”

“Yes.”

“What about her?”

“She is wise. And she is kind.”

“Then what happened to you?” Natasha asked. 

Loki’s smile was bitter. “I happened, Agent Romanov. In spite of Frigga’s best efforts, I happened. It would have been better for everyone if I hadn’t. I will leave you now, and if Agent Barton wishes not to be troubled by me anymore, he only needs to say so.”

“Wait,” she said, catching his coat sleeve as he stood up.

He sat back down, eyebrows raised. 

“Yes?”

“I wish I could meet her. Frigga. I’d like to thank her for what she did for Clint.”

“You should speak to Thor. He is still welcome in her halls…”

“And you’re still her son,” Natasha said. 

“If you think you can somehow use her to get rid of me…”

“Look, Thor’s already wasted his time trying to plead with her to get you away from Clint. It’s not going to work, because it’s not what Clint wants, and if she still loves you after what you’ve done, she obviously believes that everyone has to deal with their own demons. And I didn’t really think I’d ever actually get a chance to meet her… but maybe you could tell her, someday, that there’s a woman here on Earth who’s very grateful to her for what she did.”

“If I have the opportunity, I will tell her.”

“Clint said that you asked her to heal him because she can’t heal you.”

Loki’s face shifted for a moment. “I am beyond redemption. He is not.”

She nodded, then stood up from the bench, her legs stiff from sitting. 

“Is that all, then?” he asked, seeming amused. 

“I wanted to understand who I was dealing with a little better,” she said. “Now I do.”

“Does it change your plans?”

“I didn’t really have a plan yet. You have to know what your enemy is up to before you can come up with a plan.”

“Am I the enemy?”

“Well, that would be an important part of the equation, wouldn’t it?”

Loki grinned. “I would think it would be a key factor.”

“I’m not reading you as the enemy,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t think you’re dangerous. I don’t think you have a plan, I don’t think you know what you’re doing, I don’t think you have any idea how you expect this all to turn out, and I don’t think any of it is going according to whatever plan you thought you had at the beginning.”

Loki studied her evenly for a moment. “I would have to agree with that assessment, Agent Romanov.”

She glanced over her shoulder, shivered, and pulled the collar of her coat up around her face before turning back to Loki. 

“I still think you’re dangerous.”

“You would be a fool to think otherwise.”

“What you said, about your mother saying you’re beyond redemption…”

He raised his eyebrows. 

“She doesn’t believe it,” Natasha said. “She’ll never believe it. You could betray her to the end of time and she still wouldn’t believe it.”

“What makes you say that?”

She smiled wryly. “Because even if everyone else in the world thought Clint wasn’t worth fighting for, was too far gone to get back, I might pretend to believe it… but I wouldn’t. I would never stop believing I could reach him, somehow.”

She turned and walked off, frozen grass crunching under her boots. Loki sat on the bench and watched her go, then stayed to watch the afternoon pass, the sun set behind the skyscrapers, and the few stars that could be seen over the lights of the city scattering across the night sky. 

 

 

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	26. Chapter 26

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> While Natasha talks to a visitor from Asgard and starts to get an idea what may happen between Clint and Loki, Clint is already off making it happen, and it's not going to be pretty, but there's a chance it might not be as ugly as it could be. 
> 
> .  
> .  
> .

By the next morning Clint seemed physically back to normal, but Natasha insisted on testing it by sparring with him for a few hours in the gym before proclaiming him fit to return to normal duties. They found Steve preparing to go out for a jog and Tony and Bruce in the kitchen.

“Aren’t you guys supposed to do science or something?” Clint asked.

“Food is science,” Bruce said, without looking up from the eggs he was scrambling. “Cooking these eggs, for example, causes the proteins to denature and…”

“And causes them to taste good,” Tony noted. “Although you two athletes and Captain Tightpants are probably all about the glass of raw eggs for protein…”

“Ugh. No,” Natasha said. Clint stuck out his tongue in disgust.

“Well, I can make more scrambled eggs if you want some,” Bruce offered.

“You know I want some,” Clint said. “And…”

“Agent Romanov?” JARVIS politely interrupted.

She rolled her eyes. “What? All the people I’m supposed to keep out of trouble are right in front of me except Steve and he’s in the gym.”

“There is an urgent call for you from Director Fury.”

“Fury thinks everything is urgent,” Tony said. “Sit down and have some eggs first.”

“Sir, Director Fury states that members of the royal family of Asgard have arrived and that they demand to speak with Agent Romanov.”

Clint looked up. “Does that mean Thor?”

“Director Fury did not specify.”

“I’m going too.”

“Director Fury was very specific about that, Agent Barton. They are requesting to speak to Agent Romanov and only Agent Romanov. A Quinjet is on its way to transport her. They have orders not to allow anyone else on board.”

Clint scowled.

“They do know Steve is technically our team leader, right?” Natasha asked.

“I am sure Director Fury made that clear to them. However, they are adamant that they speak to you and that they do so as soon as possible.”

Clint glanced at Natasha. “If Thor was back, wouldn’t he have come straight here?”

“Not if he had company,” she murmured.

He nodded. “Yeah. That’s what I was thinking. And if it was Thor, he wouldn’t be asking to talk to just you, would he?”

“But who in Asgard has any reason to want to Natasha in particular and not the team?” Bruce asked. “None of us have met any of them except Thor and Loki, and…”

Natasha raised her eyebrows and glanced at Clint. “I think I know who wants to talk to me. And what she wants to talk to me about.”

“She?”

“You’ve met her, even if the rest of us haven’t,” she said. “I need to go get cleaned up, if I’m going to be meeting with royalty.”

She was halfway to the elevator before she turned to the others again.

“There will be no interference with this meeting. Understood… Clint?”

He scowled. “Yeah, yeah.”

“I’m serious. As far as S.H.I.E.L.D. is concerned you’re already walking a really fine line with this thing with Loki, and if you show up and fuck up a diplomatic meeting with Asgardian royalty, it’s not going to look good. Really, really not going to look good.”

“I get it!” he said, raising his hands.

“If I find out you tried to interfere with this in any way, I will shoot you with a stun gun. In the balls. Do you get that?”

Clint backed away, and Tony and Bruce winced.

“Yeah. I definitely get that.”

“Good. JARVIS, what’s the ETA on the Quinjet?”

“Fifteen minutes.”

“They don’t leave a lady much time to get prettied up, do they,” she muttered. “Oh, well.”

 

 

 

 

The Quinjet had just vanished out of sight over the buildings when Clint set down his mostly-empty plate and started toward the elevator.

“Ummm…” Bruce said.

Clint kept walking.

“I think she was serious about shooting you in the balls with a stun gun,” Tony said.

“So do I,” Clint said. “I’m not going to interfere with her meeting in any way.”

Bruce and Tony glanced at each other. “Then we can go with you, right?”

“No.”

“Then…”

“She’s not meeting with Loki,” Clint said. “So I’m not messing with her meeting.”

“You will be if you spill the beans that there are members of the Asgardian royal family here on Earth and…”

“I’m not going to tell him that,” Clint said. “I’m going to deal with what I need to deal with, and if Thor or someone else is here to mess that up or take Loki away or do something else to keep me from doing what I have to do, I need to do it now, before they get a chance.”

“I’d ask you if you’re sure that’s a good idea, but that’s kind of a stupid question, under the circumstances,” Tony said. “Last time you saw him you could hardly move for half a day. What are you going to do to him that…”

“What he’s waiting for me to do,” Clint said. “Finish this… thing. Whatever it is. He doesn’t know how. So we’re stuck, unless I finish it. And it has to be before Thor or anyone can…”

“Ummm, I’m going to interrupt here because your repeated use of the word ‘finish’ is a bit concerning,” Bruce said.

“And you know you can’t just go wandering around the streets of New York with a bow and arrows,” Tony added.

Clint shrugged. “The first time I ever met Loki, all I had was a pistol. That’ll work for this time, too. Just in case it’s the last time.”

Bruce looked at Tony. “Don’t we need to be stopping him or something?”

“Are you going to stop him?”

Bruce looked back at Clint. “You don’t…”

“Yeah. I do. If Natasha calls, you can tell her everything I just told you, if you want. It won’t matter by that point anyway.”

“Clint, I don’t like the way you’re talking about this,” Tony said.

Clint shrugged. “I didn’t start this. I just happened to be the one watching the cube when Loki decided to come through, and I just happened to be the one who got tangled up in it with him. And I thought he’d have the balls to end it, one way or another, but after last time, I realized he doesn’t. And I’m not living like this forever. So one way or another, I’m going to end it.”

  
“That doesn’t make me feel any better.”

“Oh, well. You can either hold me here against my will, which is probably gonna take the Hulk, or you can let me go deal with this.”

“I’m not bringing the Other Guy out to fight a teammate,” Bruce said.

Clint nodded. “Then just tell Natasha what I said.”

“Will she understand? Because we don’t.”

“No,” he said, lowering his head. “But maybe she’ll figure it out eventually.”

 

 

 

 

Fury was waiting when the Quinjet arrived on the Helicarrier. Natasha knew better than to expect an explanation or anything useful out of him, especially when he had that look on his face and Maria Hill straight and silent at his side, so she just followed them across the windy landing deck and into the ship.

“Agent Hill will take you to your meeting,” Fury said, turning toward the control room. “I’m assuming the team knows you’re here…”

“JARVIS announces everything to everybody unless you specifically tell him not to, sir.”

“Well, he is Tony Stark’s AI,” Hill said, with a hint of a smirk. “You’d expect him not to know when to shut up.”

“At least the AI isn’t sleeping with half the team,” Fury muttered.

“Technically, sir, Barton and Banner are only a third of the team,” Agent Hill said. “Unless there’s something else going on I haven’t been informed of.”

Natasha bit her lip, and Fury stalked off to do whatever he did. Agent Hill waved her hand, and Natasha followed her.

“If I’d had a little more warning I’d have tried to look a little better,” she said, running a hand through her hair.

“Sorry,” Hill said. “Our guest says she’s here without the knowledge of the other Asgardians and that she can’t stay very long, so we had to get you here fast. And she won’t say anything else, except that she wanted to talk to you and no one but you.”

“Frigga? The queen?”

She nodded. “Have you met her?”

“No. And I don’t know what she wants.”

Agent Hill glanced at her. “I’m sure you know this, but even if you think the recording devices in a room a turned off…”

“They’re not.”

“Right.”

“I never got to thank you,” Natasha said. “For the warning.”

Hill smiled. “We both know Fury trusts you.”

“What does he know about Loki?”

Hill stopped in the hall and turned to face her, speaking in a very low voice. “You want to know what he knows about Loki and Clint. He knows Clint is meeting with him voluntarily. And that it’s not exactly business. And that no one is entirely sure whether Loki is using Clint in some way to gather information or to weaken the team for an attack or just to compromise Clint again and use him against another target.”

“We’re not going to let that happen.”

“Barton doesn’t listen to authority and you know it. We know your team doesn’t have any control over him. We don’t know what he’s doing, and honestly, Romanov, I don’t want to, because we’d probably have to do something about it, and nobody would like it. But you guys need to get this under control, and quickly, and whatever this lady wants…”

“I’m working on it. You know I am. Clint’s my partner.”

“And you’ve been known to be blind to some of his more questionable behaviors.”

“We have a job to do. What he does outside his job…”

Hill glanced at her. “This isn’t a job, Romanov, and you know it. This is a life. Here’s the meeting room. She’s waiting for you.”

She keyed a security code into the door panel, then stepped back and nodded. Natasha stepped into the room, hearing the door hiss shut behind her.

 

 

 

The woman who rose from her seat at the table to greet her was tall, slender, and graceful, with rich blond hair piled in elaborate braids around her head. She wore a long green robe embroidered with gold, and no matter how hard Natasha tried, she could not attempt to guess her age; one moment she seemed surprisingly young to be a mother to grown men like Thor and Loki, but in another moment her knowing eyes seemed to see back into an endless past. She wore no crown, but every motion spoke of royalty.

“I am pleased to meet you, Agent Romanov.”

Natasha carefully shook the extended hand. “I’m pleased to meet you too… Frigga?”

“Yes. Shall we sit? I would offer you something to eat or drink, but no one has brought such things yet…”

Natasha smiled. “S.H.I.E.L.D. people aren’t really used to attending to queens, ma’am. But now that you’ve said something, I’m sure they’ll be here shortly.”

The woman frowned. “Can they hear us?”

“There are devices all over the room… all over the ship… that record everything anyone says,” Natasha explained, and she met Frigga’s eyes and made sure she understood.

“I see,” she said slowly. “Then people here must speak cautiously.”

“Very cautiously. Especially if the subject matter happens to involve one god of chaos, who happens to be not very popular around here right now.”

Natasha watched as the other woman took a moment to contemplate how to proceed.

“If we were to leave this ship, could we talk in private?”

“If you go anywhere, they’ll want to send a transport and guards to keep you safe.”

Frigga’s eyes narrowed as she understood that S.H.I.E.L.D. didn’t attend to leave her unattended.

“I assume you would be disciplined if you voluntarily left with me,” she said. “Therefore, let your recording devices take note that I am taking the woman Agent Romanov against her will and that I will return her to her team when I am finished with her.”

Natasha was fairly sure she could hear feet headed down the hallway on their way to intervene, but Frigga just smiled and reached for Natasha’s hand.

“Shall we?”

“Whatever you wish, ma’am.”

 

 

 

Clint heard the footsteps fall in beside him as he walked down the street toward the old hotel, but he didn’t look up, and Loki didn’t speak. They walked the few blocks from where Clint had asked the cab to drop him off in silence, and it wasn’t until Loki stepped forward to open the hotel door that Clint saw his face. His eyes were dark and solemn, and the usual smirk was gone, replaced by a silent, emotionless stare.

The woman at the desk gave a quick wave and a greeting in Vietnamese; Loki responded with an easy fluency, but even in a language Clint didn’t speak a word of he could hear how flat Loki’s tone sounded.

“You don’t look good,” Clint said, once the elevator doors were closed behind them.

Loki looked at him with haunted eyes. “I wasn’t expecting you to be back. Not so soon, anyway. I shouldn’t have used…”

“What, that thing you did to me? Yeah. It sucked. Don’t do it again.”

“Then don’t provoke me,” Loki retorted, and at least there was a hint of fire in his voice.

“I don’t think it was me provoking you that bothered you so much,” Clint said, keeping his own voice casual and calm. “I think it was something going on in your head.”

“You should not have come back.”

They stepped out of the elevator and down the hall into Loki’s room. Clint closed the door behind them and turned the lock. Loki stood staring out the window at the brick wall. He didn’t flinch at the sound of a pistol being cocked behind his head, but he did smile very slightly.

“Would a large-caliber bullet to the brain stem kill you?” Clint asked.

“Yes,” Loki said. “My healing abilities are not sufficient to recover from that kind of injury. But you didn’t come here to kill me, did you?”

“I came here to finish this. That doesn’t mean either of us has to die.”

Loki glanced over his shoulder and shook his head. “Don’t you see? The Tesseract tied us in a knot of such complexity that I have no idea how to undo it. I thought I did, but it has warped my thoughts…”

“You thought you could undo the knot by undoing me,” Clint said. “Then you found out you can’t take me apart without hurting yourself, too. But I think there’s a way to end this. And if I have to kill you, I will.”

“What if I kill you first? You know I’m quite capable of it.”

“You can’t kill me,” Clint said. “You wanted to. Last time.”

“Every time,” Loki whispered. “Every time I see you, I want to kill you so this pain will stop.”

“And then you realized killing me won’t stop it.”

Loki nodded.

“You had somewhere you were going to take me, eventually,” Clint said. “Somewhere where you could do anything you wanted to me, somewhere my team couldn’t find me, somewhere nobody could find either of us.”

“Yes.”

“Take us there now.”

“You realize that if I do that, and you do kill me, you will have no way of returning home.”

Clint smiled and pulled a small electronic device out of his pocket. “You’d be surprised what kind of stuff Tony and Bruce play with when they’re supposed to be working. I found out about this from their lab notes, after the Tesseract energy jumped dimensions. Tony wanted to design something that could track an object even if it travelled between worlds. They came up with this. It’s a communicator.”

He pulled the two halves of the device apart, and immediately a low hum began to emanate from both parts.

“It’s some kind of quantum signal,” Clint said. “According to Bruce’s notes, it has something to do with subatomic particles that exist in some kind of paired state and can detect changes in the state of the other one no matter where it is, even across universes, theoretically. If I leave one half here and take the other half with me, the team will be able to use this half to figure out where the other half went.”

“Clever.”

“Science. And I am making the assumption that they’ll figure out I took it, because I didn’t exactly leave them a note or anything.”

Loki smiled grimly. “We mustn’t make things too easy for them, little Hawk.”

“Take us there,” Clint said.

“What do you plan to do?”

“I’ll tell you when we get there.”

“You’ll tell me when we get there, or you’ll figure it out when we get there?” Loki asked.

“Little bit of both. Let’s go.”

 

 

 

A few disorienting moments later, Natasha found herself standing next to a familiar park bench, with Frigga standing beside her, hand still resting on Natasha’s arm.

“You were watching when I came here to meet Loki,” she said.

Frigga nodded. “I was watching Loki. I have been watching him. I fear for him.”

“Well, it’s Clint I’m worried about, and Loki’s the demigod, and Clint’s not.”

Frigga studied her for a long moment, and Natasha felt herself being thoroughly and completely examined, read, and contemplated.

“You told Loki that regardless of what I told him, I would never truly believe that he was beyond redemption,” she said, finally. “How did you know that?”

“Because Loki and Clint are… not the same, but… they’re broken in the same ways. They’re smart in the same ways, and stubborn in the same ways. And they both think they’re too damaged for anyone to save them,” Natasha said, considering her words as she spoke. “And I know that’s not true for Clint, because I… I know he’ll always come back. To us. To me. From wherever he is.”

Frigga nodded. “You must understand, though, that Loki has nothing to come back to. He has no team waiting for him, ready to heal his wounds. He…”

“Burned all his bridges,” Natasha said. “Clint tried. We keep putting out the fires.”

“He has burned all his bridges, save one,” Frigga said.

“Clint.”

“Using the Tesseract to control Clint’s mind let them see each other in a way very few ever do. They saw something that they shared. I’m afraid for my son, Agent Romanov. I’m afraid that Clint is the last creature in any realm, in any world, that he can still reach out to, even if it is in a disturbed and violent way.”

“If it wasn’t disturbed and violent, Clint wouldn’t be interested,” Natasha muttered, shaking her head. “I want to have some sympathy for your son. I really do. And you helped Clint, so I’ll help Loki, if I can, but not at Clint’s expense. Tell me what we need to do.”

Frigga bowed her head. “Loki told me you were a woman of strength. You are wiser than I would have expected a mortal to be, but perhaps I shall find that mortals are stronger and wiser than we ever realized. Thor keeps telling me…”

“We’d really like to have him back.”

“I will not allow it,” Frigga said. “Not at this moment. He will interfere…”

“Yeah. We want him to interfere.”

Frigga shook her head. “Do you realize what will happen if he does? It will force both your friend and my son into a position where they must take action. And it seems very likely that there will be death. Whether it is Loki’s or Thor’s or your friend’s…”

“That’s not going to happen if we keep Clint away from Loki.”

“That is not possible. They both know they must end this. Loki is in pain. He is desperate. He doesn’t know how to endure this loss, this loneliness, this isolation. He doesn’t know how to love someone without seeing reasons for them to betray him. He is desperate and that makes him dangerous. Clint knows this. He knows how near the edge Loki is. He knows Thor will be back, and that knowledge has already pushed him to…”

Natasha scowled and yanked her phone out of her pocket, jabbing at the screen.

“JARVIS. Where is Agent Barton?”

“Ma’am, I will need to connect you to Dr. Banner…”

“What? Why? Where the fuck is Clint?”

“He’s gone,” Bruce said.

“Yesterday he couldn’t even lift his head, and today he’s… where is he?”

“We don’t know. He said… all he said was that he had to finish things.”

“Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Why didn’t you stop him?”

“How exactly were we supposed to do that?”

She sighed. “Okay. Can you give me anything on his location, even… anything?”

“We know there was a jump from somewhere here in the city to… somewhere else,” Bruce said. “Nowhere that S.H.I.E.L.D. is registering, which means they’re not on Earth anymore. They jumped worlds.”

Natasha didn’t even have the energy left to curse; it didn’t seem like the news could get any worse.

“What did he take with him?”

“A gun,” Bruce said, and Natasha could hear in his voice that he knew how bad that meant this could be. “A gun and… JARVIS? What else did he take?”

“Along with his usual attire and his service weapon,” JARVIS said, “Agent Barton also took the beta model of the quantum tracking device from the lab…”

“What?”

“Hell,” Bruce said. “He’s always fucking smarter than we think he is.”

“Who, Clint? What quantum tracking device…”

“We may be able to find him after all,” Bruce said. “Are you on the Helicarrier?”

“No. I’ll be back to the tower in a few minutes.”

She hung up the phone and turned to Frigga, who smiled at her wearily.

“Your friend is thinking more clearly than Loki is. He knows what he must do… at least, some part of him does.”

Natasha sighed. “One of them has to die. Is that what this is?”

“That is Clint’s choice,” Frigga said. “There are other ways. Killing Loki may end this struggle, but it will not end the hurt. You will find them, but not before they have done whatever they must do. Time is different between worlds, and wherever they went, I have no doubt Loki chose a location where they would have all the time they wanted.”

Natasha crossed her arms, frustrated. “So why did you even want to talk to me? All you’ve told me is that Clint and Loki are going to kill each other over whatever this thing is and that I can’t stop it…”

“No,” she said. “I’m telling you that Clint has the power in his hands to finish this in another way. I wanted to speak to you, and only you, Agent Romanov, because you were the one who looked at my son and saw that he was damaged, but not evil… confused, but not ruined. That he can still be redeemed. That there is hope for him.”

“What, to go back to Asgard…”

“There is nothing for him in Asgard,” she said quietly. “I will never convince Odin to allow Loki to return as anything but a prisoner, not in all the time in all the worlds. He will kill him if he sees him. Loki is here, in Midgard, because his last connection with anything is here. I wanted to speak to you because if he and Clint come back from wherever they are together…”

Natasha raised her eyebrows. “He’s caused a lot of damage.”

“Is there a member of your team that hasn’t?”

“You’ve got a point,” Natasha said. “Thank you. For helping Clint. And for… I’m not sure. I don’t know if I understand, but I’ll try. I trust Clint. I trust him to know what he needs to do. He always comes back. I have to trust him that he’s going to come back again this time. And if he’s not alone…”

“I gave your friend another chance,” Frigga said. “Give my son another chance. A chance to know what it means to be accepted for who and what he is.”

“I can’t promise that. But I’ll try.”

“That is all I can ask,” she said, lowering her head.

“I have to tell you,” Natasha said. “If he kills Clint, I will find a way to hunt him down, and when I do I will kill him. I don’t care what I have to do or how long it takes. If Clint dies, there won’t be any mercy for Loki from anyone.”

“That is fair,” she said.

Before Natasha could say anything else, she vanished, leaving only footprints in the frozen grass where she had been standing. Natasha looked around to see if anyone had noticed, but no one seemed to be paying any attention, so she turned toward the street and toward the tower.

 

.  
.  
.


	27. Chapter 27

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> While the rest of the team tries to find him, Clint is busy learning a lot of things about Loki that he didn't know before, and finding out that maybe both of them might actually be able to be more than they think they are. 
> 
> .  
> .  
> .

The first thing Clint became aware of was the cold, followed a moment later by the echo. He opened his eyes and made sure the gun was still leveled at Loki’s head before glancing around. 

The room was small, with a stone floor well-polished by use and rough stone walls with no windows and no doors. The light seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. On one wall was a set of thick chains hanging from rings embedded deeply into the stone, each chain holding heavy metal cuff. Another wall held a rack of tools, clean and free of dust as though no time had passed since their last use, but Clint could see the traces of old blood in the handles and around the edges. Whips, rods, chains, knives, and unidentifiable objects were lined up as neatly as kitchen utensils, and above them in the shadows hung other things, metal clamps and things with spikes and things Clint didn’t want to know what anyone would do with. On a third wall were shelves and a table, stacked with bottles and jars of strange-colored liquids and powders. 

“What the hell is this place?” Clint asked. 

Loki smiled wearily. “A very familiar one.”

“You… do you bring people here? Did you… use those things on people? What…”

“No,” Loki said, his voice flat and without the energy to lie. “I never used any of these things on anyone.”

“But you were going to use them on me?” Clint asked, motioning to the cuffs hanging on the chains. “Those look strong enough to hold one of you guys, much less a human…”

“They are,” Loki said. 

Clint felt something stir uneasily in his stomach. Keeping the gun steady and half an eye on Loki, who made no attempt to move, he walked over and picked up one of the cuffs with his free hand, studying it. 

“This wouldn’t even fit me. The only person I know whose wrists are this small is Natasha.”

Loki held out his arms, and Clint felt that unpleasant twisting feeling in his stomach again when he realized that Loki’s wrists were as slender and graceful as the rest of him. 

“Those were… they were made to fit you.”

Loki nodded. 

“Who?”

Loki shook his head and sank to his knees, closing his eyes. “You should be able to figure that out for yourself, little Hawk. You have the eyes to see. And you know. I felt it when I was in your head. You know. Your prison was bigger, but your torment was not so different.”

Clint couldn’t keep the gun pointed at him anymore, and he lowered his arm. “Your father?”

“He is not my father.”

“You thought he was. You didn’t know…”

“I thought he was. And I didn’t know why I could never please him. Why I was always being scolded while Thor was being praised. Why… I needed to be punished. So often. Why I needed so much punishment… but it never worked, did it? He wanted to punish my true nature out of me, to beat it into submission, to force me to behave like something he could call a son… but it was never good enough. I could never stop. I couldn’t stop being what I really was, even though I didn’t know what I really was. My true nature… it would never be beaten out of me. No matter how hard he tried.”

Clint looked around, his breath catching in his throat. “This isn’t just punishment. This is way beyond punishment. This is for somebody’s sick entertainment.”

Loki looked up at him. “You see? I knew you would understand.”

Clint rubbed his face, trying to swallow the flood of memories. “Every time he was mad about something… anything. Every time he had a bad day. Every time something went wrong. Broken toaster. Argument with my mom. Flat tire. He’d come for me. Whatever it was, I paid for it. Whatever it was, somehow it was my fault.”

“And no matter how much he beat you, or how hard you tried to be good, you could never be good enough, could you?” Loki asked. “It was never enough. You could never please him enough to make it stop. He needed you. He needed to blame something, to hurt something, and you were there.”

Clint felt his eyes start to burn. “My brother, too, but mostly me.”

“My father would never have disciplined his golden son,” Loki murmured. “Until he did. Until I pushed him, tricked him, into bringing Odin’s wrath on him. And he was banished to Midgard… but not only did he return stronger and more noble than before, but also with friends who had cared for him before they knew he was a god, who thought no more or less of him because of it.”

Clint pushed a picture of Thor’s broad grin out of his head. “Did Frigga know?”

“She had an idea. I remember her pleading with me to try not to anger him so he wouldn’t have to keep trying to correct what was wrong with me…”

“Thor didn’t know, did he.”

Loki shook his head. 

“It wasn’t just…” Clint tried to ask, but couldn’t.

Loki nodded toward the jars and bottles. “He tried every witch’s potion and every sorcerer’s brew that might cure me of the evil I was born with. None of them worked. Nothing can make you stop being what you are.”

“You’re not evil,” Clint said. 

“Then what am I? I destroy everything around me. I cannot be loved. I cannot be trusted. What do you call that if not evil?”

“I call it most of my team, in one way or another,” Clint said. “Except maybe Captain America. He’s just… good. But the rest of us…”

“Not my brother.”

“No. Your brother’s pretty fucking genuinely good-hearted too,” Clint admitted. “But he’s an idiot sometimes. Really.”

“He is,” Loki agreed, smiling slightly. “I wish I could see him again… without him remembering only the things I did to harm him.”

“Those aren’t the things he remembers,” Clint said. “But I can’t take you back to my world, or back to my friends, until something happens to fix whatever got all fucked up between us. I can’t let you ruin what our team has.”

“I ruin everything,” Loki said, looking up at him. 

“No, you don’t,” Clint said, grabbing him by the arm and pulling him to his feet. “You’ve been set up your whole life to ruin everything. Your father wanted Thor on the throne. To make sure you weren’t a threat to that, you had to fail. In every possible way. You had to be the betrayer. You had to be the fuck-up. Because he brought you home, this baby, and he thought it would grow up to be a nice little Asgardian, a handy bargaining chip to use against his enemies… and he didn’t realize you would still be what you were born to be, and that was a problem. But it couldn’t be HIS problem. So it had to be yours.”

“I am the god of chaos.”

“Chaos isn’t evil,” Clint said. “It’s pretty much the general motto of the Avengers.”

“It destroys.”

“It creates, too,” Clint said. “New things. New ideas. Has to be balanced. Like Bruce and the Hulk. Like Tony’s brain and his mouth. Like me…”

“Your anger, your need for justice, balanced by…”

“By my friends. And what I have to do for them,” Clint said. “Who I have to be for them. It can’t just be about me anymore. I’m part of something bigger now, I guess, even if I didn’t ask for it…”

Loki smiled. “You are fortunate.”

“Nobody said you couldn’t be part of it too.”

Loki rolled his eyes. “Your team would never…”

“Maybe,” Clint said. “But we can’t talk about that until we fix this. You and me. And you were going to bring me here… but it wasn’t going to be so you could use these things on me, was it?”

“I don’t know. I thought it was…”

“You don’t need to be punished,” Clint said, wondering where the words were coming from, and in the back of his head seeing the face of a regal woman with a golden glow. “You need to be set free. This is your prison. We’re going to let you out.”

“And how do you plan to do that?”

Clint nodded toward the chains. “We’re going to start there.”

“Do you have any idea what you’re doing?”

“I think so?”

“Would you care to explain?”

“This was never your choice before. And you never had the choice to ask for it to stop. So now you’re going to have the choice. And we’re going to push it till you ask for it to stop. And then it will. Because you can trust me. Because this is different. And when you’re ready for it to stop, it’s going to stop.”

Loki stepped forward and raised his arms. “You may proceed, little Hawk. I trust you. I’m not sure why, when you had a gun to my head…”

“I didn’t shoot you, did I?”

“You have a point.”

 

 

 

Clint took his time stripping Loki of his clothes, adjusting the chains until he was on his knees on the cold stone with his hands above his head. He left him there, noticing that Loki didn’t even glance over to see what he was doing as he looked over the rack of whips and vicious-looking thin wooden rods and other things that Clint would never use on anyone unless he planned to kill them with it, and even then only if he planned to kill them quickly. He selected a whip, a well-used one, from the feeling of the leather and the supple flex of it as he spun it in the air. 

“I recognize that sound,” Loki murmured. 

“Yeah. Except this time, you decide when it’s over,” Clint said. “You understand?”

Loki nodded, still facing the wall. 

“Do you believe me? That I’ll stop when you ask?”

Another nod, this one barely perceptible. 

“Okay.”

Something was flowing through him, a tingling sense of power and control, and from beneath it came a sudden, unexpected surge of rage. For a moment his mind was full of the things Loki had done to him, the things Loki had forced him to do, the things that had tormented him afterwards. His hand tightened around the whip, and for a moment he thought to himself that he didn’t have to stop, that no one would know what happened in this room but him and no one would blame him if they did, that he could take those horrible things off the shelf and take out on Loki every ounce of pain and misery that Loki had inflicted on him, and he knew that Loki would not question why. 

He forced the thoughts down, hard. He took a step back, making himself take a long look at the thin, quiet figure kneeling and chained in front of him, head lowered and waiting. 

This is why nobody thinks you should be allowed to have this kind of power, he thought to himself. You told him he could trust you. 

His hand loosened around the handle of the whip, and he took a long, slow breath. This wasn’t the time for punishment. It wasn’t time for revenge. There had been enough punishment, and Clint knew perfectly well and from hard experience that revenge was hollow at best. He wasn’t completely sure what he was doing, but it wasn’t either of those things. He stepped forward again, keeping his voice low. 

“This is over when you say it’s over.”

Loki sighed. “It will never be over.”

“You never had the choice before, did you?”

 

 

 

 

The first blows seemed not to hurt Loki at all; they barely left a mark on the smooth, pale skin, even when Clint laid the whip down harder than he would have on any human partner, even one he meant to hurt. After what seemed like a long time in this place with no time, the red welts began to deepen as the healing abilities of the demigod’s body tried to keep pace with the damage being inflicted on it. It was when Clint started laying sharp red lines across the already raised and bleeding ones that he managed to draw the first sounds out of Loki, but they were muffled and wordless. 

He kept at it, feeling the anger and the desire to hurt the one who had hurt him rising in his throat again, but he was surprised by how quickly the rage swelled, peaked, and suddenly vanished, leaving nothing in its wake except an empty place where it had lived for so long. Clint looked down at his handiwork, at the bruised and bleeding welts striping the lean figure kneeling at his feet, at Loki’s hands gripping the chains above the cuffs in a grip so tight Clint half-expected the metal to bend. But these chains were made to hold a demigod. This demigod. And they had held him… how many times? How long did these people live? How long had Odin been using this room to take out his anger and frustration on the body and mind of the child he wished he’d never brought home, the one his wife protected against his will?

“Loki,” Clint said. 

Loki raised his head slightly, his hair disheveled and his face expressionless. 

“Loki, is this the only set of cuffs?”

Loki smiled. “No. The smiths had to make larger ones as I grew.”

“Are the other ones still in here?”

“On the top shelf.”

Clint laid the whip down and walked to the shelves where the horrible, vicious things lay in the shadows, sharp-edged, spiked, ugly. He reached up, feeling with his fingers, and after a moment his hand closed around something familiar. He pulled down another set of cuffs, still attached to their chain. He studied them for a long moment; they would have fit as neatly around his wrists as the leather bracers he’d worn to protect his arms from the bowstring when he first started learning to shoot. He reached up again, and the pair he found this time were even smaller. He couldn’t remember his wrists being small enough to be enclosed in them. Clint let them fall to the floor. 

“You’re not going to tell me to stop, are you.”

Loki shook his head. 

“Then I’m saying it for you. It’s time to stop. It’s enough.”

Loki’s head slumped, and as hard as he was to read, Clint was almost certain that there was relief in the sag of his shoulders. He reached for the bolts holding the cuffs around Loki’s wrists and released them. For a moment Loki sat, letting his arms gingerly back down to his sides, but then he started to slip to the side, and before Clint knew what he was doing he was on his knees, letting Loki fall against his chest instead of the stone floor. 

“We’re done here,” Clint said, running his fingers through the dark hair. “You’re never coming back here again. Tell this place goodbye, and then take us back to the tower.”

“I can’t enter the tower,” Loki murmured. 

“I think you can,” Clint said. “Frigga was the one who made that rule, and she did it for me. So if I’m telling you that you can come in…”

Loki glanced up at him. “You don’t know what you’re doing. I will always be Loki.”

“I know what I’m doing,” he said. “I’ll always be Clint. Take us home.”

 

 

 

It had taken Natasha two days, using the coordinates Tony and Bruce could narrow down from Loki’s known movements, to find the old hotel and to charm the old men in the lobby into telling her which room was Loki’s. All of them gave her different room numbers, but she didn’t really have any objection to breaking into all of them, and in the third one she opened the door and found the device Tony had shown her a picture of sitting on the table. Well, half of the device, anyway, which was a good thing, because if they were lucky it meant the other half was with Clint. 

Apparently interdimensional quantum mechanics was a lot of work even for JARVIS, because the computer and Tony and Bruce spent another day and a half without sleep or a break, tweaking the calculations, adjusting measurements, and swearing extensively (except JARVIS). Natasha lurked, but had little to offer; she had many skill sets, but particle physics wasn’t one of them. It was, however, one of Bruce’s, and eventually it began to seem like they were getting somewhere. 

“We’ve got the link between the particles,” he explained, rubbing his scruffy face as he turned the screen for Natasha to look. “We’re just trying to configure things so that we can figure out where those other particles are.”

“Yeah, but even if we do, that doesn’t mean we have a way to get there,” she said. “Thor isn’t coming back until Frigga lets him and that’s not till Clint and Loki have already done whatever damage they’re going to do.”

“Hey, give us a little credit for getting this far,” Bruce said. “This is the first time, as far as I know, that anyone has even come close to locating a paired quantum particle after it’s been transported outside our universe. And the calculations are narrowing down the location… it’s complicated, but maybe by tonight…”

“Excuse me, sir,” JARVIS broke in, “but according to our current calculations, the location of the device has changed drastically.”

Tony slammed his fists on the table. “Are you fucking kidding me? It’s taken us… what, thirty-some hours just to set up a grid to start triangulating an exact location for this thing, and now it moved and we have to do it all over again?”

“Fuck,” Bruce muttered, banging his head off the keyboard. “There goes all our work.”

“What if Clint doesn’t have another thirty-some hours for us to…” Natasha started to ask, but JARVIS’s calm tone interrupted again. 

“The calculations should be much simpler this time, if there is any need to perform them at all.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Tony demanded. 

“Well, we are seeking the quantum tracking device in order to locate Agent Barton, correct?”

“Damnit… yes, JARVIS.”

“Well, sir, the device should be quite simple to locate, since Agent Barton has just arrived in the living room.”

“What? Is he okay?”

“He appears to be quite unharmed, ma’am, but I should warn you that he is not alone, and that his traveling companion seems to be rather damaged.”

Tony raised his eyebrows. “Traveling companion?”

Natasha shook her head. “Come on. I’ll explain it in the elevator. Well, I’ll sort of explain part of it. The rest, I have no clue.”

 

 

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	28. Chapter 28

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clint's return creates confusion when it becomes obvious that he brought along some rather questionable company. Second chances (and third and fourth and so on) are discussed. A certain demigod makes his reappearance.
> 
> .  
> .  
> .

None of them were necessarily surprised, after what JARVIS had told them, to find Clint kneeling on the living room floor with Loki’s head in his lap. They were, however, surprised to find Steve there too, wrapping a blanket from the couch around the naked, pale, blood-streaked figure. 

“Umm… isn’t that the enemy?” Tony asked. 

Steve looked up at him. “He’s unconscious, and he’s hurt, and he doesn’t look good. In my book, that’s not an enemy. Just a person who needs help. We deal with the other part later.”

Natasha stepped closer. “I thought he looked thinner when I saw him. And that place he was living… what’s he been doing to himself, Clint?”

“Waiting,” Clint said. “Punishing himself. Waiting for someone… Thor or Thanos or me… to come find him and put an end to it.”

“What are we going to do with him?” Tony asked, and he was looking at Clint. 

Clint looked back at him with no hesitation. “He needs some rest, and then he needs cleaned up and something decent to eat. That’s not asking a whole lot, is it?”

“Not unless he decides that somewhere in between rest and food comes destroying the tower and trying to wreck the entire city again,” Tony pointed out. 

“That’s not going to happen,” Clint said. 

Natasha sighed. “Clint… what makes you so sure?”

“Because there’s no reason for him to do that. Even if the Asgardians hadn’t stripped him of most of his powers after we sent him back there… he’s got nothing to gain from turning on us.”

Natasha glanced at Tony and Bruce. “According to Frigga, he can’t go back to Asgard and he’s not really welcome anywhere else, either. I told you what she said…”

“A second chance for Loki, because of the second chance she gave Clint,” Bruce said. “It’s not like he’s the only person in this room to get a second chance after making some really, really big mistakes, is he?”

The team looked around at each other. 

“Guess I’m on my fourth or fifth chance, at least,” Tony said, finally. “Let’s take him to one of the guest rooms. Clint and Natasha can stand guard until he wakes up and we can talk to him about what he intends to do. Does that sound reasonable?”

Steve nodded. “If I was sick and injured and on the wrong side of enemy lines, I’d hope to be treated with at least that much courtesy. I think it’s fair. After he’s awake and talking, we can deal with what he wants and what he’s planning to do.”

“He doesn’t want anything,” Clint said. “And he doesn’t have any plans. I brought him here because he doesn’t have anything and he doesn’t have anyone and he doesn’t have anywhere to go. No family, no home, no plan, no future except waiting for one of his mistakes to come back and kill him. That’s it. That’s why I brought him here.”

“An enemy with nothing to lose can be really dangerous,” Tony said, but there wasn’t anything argumentative in his voice. 

“If he’s got nothing to lose, what makes him the enemy?” Steve asked. “I mean, who put the idea to attack Earth in his head anyway? I don’t think that was his plan until Thanos found him and realized he could take advantage of him. It wouldn’t take a genius to figure out how badly he wanted to do something to prove himself…”

“And then exploit it by offering him more power than he could handle and sending him here knowing it was probably all going to go really badly,” Natasha said. “From the intel Fury has on this Thanos guy, it doesn’t sound like he ever intended to let Loki rule Earth even if he did take over. He just wanted somebody to come down here and pick a fight to see what we’d come back with. That’s all Loki was for him.”

Steve nodded as he lifted the blanket-wrapped, unresisting body and shifted the weight in his arms. Tony shrugged. 

“I guess I could say something about the fact that he’s not going to stop being insane, but that would apply to pretty much everyone in this building, so… yeah. Insane sort of goes with the territory.”

Natasha looked over at Clint, still kneeling on the floor and watching Steve carry Loki away. As the others followed him, she turned and sat down in front of her partner. 

“Clint? You want to tell me what happened?”

“Only if Loki says I can,” Clint said. “There are things you don’t tell people unless…”

“I understand. But you…”

He smiled, eyes calm and head tilted back. “I’m fine. Better than fine. Better than…”

“What are we going to do with Loki?”

“The same things we do for each other,” Clint said. 

“I think it might be better if the some of the sex part got left out of that.”

“I think that part… it’s done,” Clint said. “Me and him.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Why’s that?”

“Same reason as me and you,” he said, reaching up to run a hand through her hair. “Because we’ll hurt each other and I’m not going to let that happen.”

She took his hand and held it, and they sat for long minutes in silence until JARVIS broke in to tell them that Mr. Stark was asking whether they had forgotten how to use the elevator. 

 

 

 

Bruce insisted that he was going to bed, and that it was also time for Tony to go to bed, and that the fact that Tony was quite capable of going for several days without sleep did not mean that he was pleasant or decent to be around when doing so. After almost four days of very little sleep and a lot of time staring at computer screens trying to pin down their half-programmed and untested tracking device, Steve decided to intervene and state rather firmly that Tony needed to go to bed and that he and Natasha and Clint were fully capable of handling Loki. 

“Natasha hasn’t slept in four days either,” Tony pouted. 

Steve glanced at her. “Why don’t you look as bad as they do?”

“Youth and beauty,” she said. 

“Makeup,” Clint said. “Under-eye brightening concealer does wonders.”

“You’re not supposed to share a lady’s secrets.”

Steve shook his head. “Go sleep. Clint and I can handle things. Loki doesn’t look like he’s going to be up causing trouble any time in the next few hours.”

Natasha rolled her eyes, but Clint knew she must be exhausted when she gave in without a fight and headed off toward her room. Bruce took Tony by the arm and tugged him away, and Steve and Clint stood in the hall outside the guest room, waiting until the others were gone before Steve spoke again. 

“He’s not going to be up causing trouble any time soon, is he?”

Clint shook his head. “I don’t think he is. We pretty much burned all the fight out of him. Out of both of us, maybe. I don’t know. But I think he’s probably just going to sleep for a while. I don’t know how long we were in that place… I didn’t really have any concept of time, but then Tony just said four days…”

“Maybe you need some rest too,” Steve pointed out. 

Clint shrugged. “I’m staying.”

“Suit yourself,” Steve said. 

They stepped into the room, where JARVIS had the lights dimmed to a level where Steve could see well, but Clint’s eyes without serum enhancement took a minute to adjust. Eventually he could make out a head of dark hair against the whiteness of the pillows, undisturbed by the soft hiss of the door or the light from the hallway. 

“Still asleep?” Clint asked. 

“Looks like it,” Steve said. “Pull up a seat, and we’ll keep an eye on him just to make sure.”

They settled down at the table, and eventually Clint pulled out his phone and managed to convince Steve to try playing “Zombie Tsunami”, which was fine until he started beating Clint’s high scores, and Clint was making an excuse about wearing out the battery when they heard muttering and movement from the bed. 

Clint’s eyes were still half-blind from the bright phone screen, but he walked until his knees bumped the edge of the bed and sat down, reaching out a hand. Loki was stirring restlessly, his skin damp with sweat, and when Clint touched him he jerked away, but his eyes were closed and his words incoherent. When Clint put his hand between his shoulder blades and pressed him gently down against the bed, he murmured something and settled back into the pillows and went silent. Clint stayed where he was, keeping the even pressure of his hand against the rise and fall of Loki’s breath. 

“Someone did bad things to him, didn’t they,” Steve asked. 

“Yeah. A lot of bad things.”

Steve nodded. “Natasha said she doesn’t think he’s evil. She said he just keeps causing damage because he doesn’t know how to stop.”

“He’s going to learn,” Clint said. “People can learn. Natasha learned. I learned. We’re…”

“I know. Some people with good hearts and good intentions end up on the wrong side. Sometimes it’s hard to know which side is the right one, especially when neither side looks very good.”

Clint nodded and leaned back in his chair. “What about Thor?”

“Thor’s one of those guys who always wants to do the right thing. But it’s what he thinks is the right thing. And people… they don’t always know. We let ourselves believe things…”

“Like letting himself believe this was all about protecting me and not about him being jealous of his brother?”

“That’s a hard thing to admit to yourself,” Steve said. “Especially when there’s an easier answer right there on the table.”

“Yeah,” Clint said quietly. “I want to see if he’ll admit it now.”

Steve shrugged. “Does he have a reason to be jealous of his brother anymore? I mean, is this…”

“No,” Clint said. “It’s done.”

“What are you two, then? You’re not friends…”

“I don’t know. Two guys who fought in the same war and thought they were fighting on different sides, and then didn’t know what to do when the war was over?”

“Yeah,” Steve said. “That I can understand.”

 

 

 

The door slid open, and Steve and Clint both raised a hand against the brightness from the hall, which was partly blocked by a tall, muscular figure in full Asgardian armor, hammer clasped loosely in one hand. 

“Way to make an entrance,” Clint muttered. 

“Is that my brother?” Thor demanded, stepping into the room and looking down at Loki. 

Clint’s hand stayed where it was, feeling Loki’s breath shift at the sound of Thor’s voice, then even out again. 

“Yeah.”

Thor spent a long moment looking back and forth between Clint and Loki, confusion and frustration warring across his face as he seemed to be struggling to decide which one to go to first. 

“What happened? Why is he here? Frigga refused to let me leave Asgard and she told me that you and my brother would… I feared I would find one of you dead. Or both.”

Thor’s voice rose as he spoke, and Loki stirred uneasily, pulling his arms back against his chest. Thor saw it and the anger dissolved into helpless guilt. He reached down and ran a hand across Loki’s head. Loki shifted slightly into the touch for a moment before slumping back to the pillows. 

“He’s going to be fine,” Clint said, carefully drawing his hand back and turning toward Thor. “He just needs some rest. And some time to get things straight.”

Thor sighed. “He looks… weary.”

“Yeah, well… it’s been a long day. Days? I don’t know. I can’t figure it out. We were… somewhere else.”

“I know where you were,” Thor said, his voice low and dark. “Frigga showed me before she allowed me to return here. I had no idea… if I had known…”

Clint shrugged. “You weren’t supposed to know.”

“I would have stopped it.” Thor growled. “I should have known, but my father…”

“It’s hard to believe someone you respect and look up to could be doing something horrible right under your nose,” Clint said. “Finding that out when I was a kid almost got me killed.”

“Frigga told me you had brought him here and convinced the team to allow him to stay and recover… I didn’t believe it until I saw it. What happened, little Hawk, that you want to show such mercy to the one who hurt you so much?”

“I figured out that hurting him wasn’t going to un-hurt me,” Clint said. 

Steve smiled quietly in the darkness. 

“Captain Steve,” Thor said, clearing his throat. “May I borrow our Hawk for a while?”

“Sure. I think I can handle things here.”

Clint raised his eyebrows. “What if I’d rather stay here? What if I’m still pissed off about you deciding to vanish off to Asgard and try to take my decisions out of my hands instead of letting me figure them out myself?”

“I…” Thor began, argumentative, but then he lowered his head. “I’m sorry. You are right. It was selfish. I could not bear the idea of my brother harming you…”

“Is that really what got under your skin?” Clint asked. “You sure it wasn’t something else?”

Thor scowled. “His hands on you… thinking of him seeing you, touching you, like that…”

“It happened,” Clint said. 

“I know,” Thor murmured, and turned toward the door. “I will leave you with him. I had no right to make choices for you then, and I have no right to do so now.”

He was nearly out the door before a noise made him turn around, just in time to catch Clint in his arms as he hit him in the chest like a cannonball and wrapped his arms around him. Steve muffled a chuckle as Clint drew back, rubbing his elbow. 

“That armor is really hard. We need to get you back into regular clothes.”

Thor grinned. “You wish to assist me in the removal of my armor? It is rather tedious to do alone, you know.”

“I might lend you a hand. If I get something out of it.”

Thor glanced toward the bed, and his smile faded. “Little Hawk, I cannot share you with my brother. I… know it is not fair to…”

“It’s done,” Clint said, his hands sliding down to find Thor’s. “Me and him. It’s done. Whatever had to happen, it happened and it’s done.”

Thor exhaled and grasped Clint tightly, squeezing him until Clint protested and banged on his armor with the arm he could get loose. Thor laughed and released him. 

“Will you come to my room and assist me with this tiresome armor that keeps me from properly enjoying your closeness?” he asked. 

Clint glanced at Steve. Steve chuckled and waved his hand. 

“Like I said. I can handle things here.”

The door slid shut behind them. Steve settled back in his chair, pulled out the seldom-used phone that he usually tried to ignore in his back pocket, and started trying to figure out how one managed to get “Zombie Tsunami” installed on it. After an hour he gave up and called Tony, who walked him through it with sleepy amusement and Bruce laughing in the background, and then he settled back to play. He kept half an eye on the sleeping stranger in the bed, but the hours slipped by toward dawn and although Loki stirred and whispered, he didn’t wake. 

 

 

 

Clint could feel the electricity from Thor’s skin every time his fingers brushed against it as they both grappled with the many hooks and buckles that held the armor in place. The bed was still halfway across the room, and pieces of armor and parts of whatever Clint was wearing were dropped unceremoniously on the floor. They reached the bed nearly naked, and Thor grinned and rolled Clint to pin him down, pressing their bodies together and leaving Clint half-dazed from the sudden jolt of skin-to-skin contact. Thor’s grin faded. 

“Little Hawk?”

Clint blinked. “Yeah.”

“Are you all right?”

“I… yeah. Brain’s just having a hard time putting signals together…”

Thor’s expression turned sheepish. “I am sorry. In my eagerness I hadn’t realized…”

He took a few slow breaths, and the buzz of electricity faded from thought-scrambling to a pleasant tingling. 

“Is that better?”

“For the moment,” Clint said, reaching up and pulling Thor down to kiss him, and that drove all the thoughts out of his head too, but only because he hadn’t expected it to feel that good, or for there so be that much heat and demand and need and desire in one kiss, or for it to last so long, or for it to gradually expand until their bodies were tangled together as intimately as their lips. 

When Thor finally drew back, Clint was pleased to note that at least Thor was just as breathless as he was, and that his cock was just as hard where it was pressed against him. 

“If I didn’t know better I’d say you missed me.”

Thor chuckled. “You could say that.”

“You were gone longer last time.”

“Yes, but… this time was different. I feared you wouldn’t be here when I returned. I feared you would be dead at my brother’s hands. I feared I would never see you again, and that I would have left without even…”

“Well… don’t do that again,” Clint said. 

“I will not. It was… poor judgment. When Frigga told me she would not allow me to return and intervene, and that you were the one person who might be able to bring Loki back from what he had become… I thought she was a fool, that she was trying to see good in Loki that wasn’t there, that she was putting too much hope in you to do the impossible…”

Clint looked up at him. “You still don’t believe he’s going to be different now, do you?”

“I… I want to. Seeing that room… and knowing you had been there with him… did you know, before you saw it?”

“No. I had some idea. But it wasn’t till we were there and I saw… everything… and then I sort of understood what we had to do.”

Thor kissed him again. “You have a heart worthy of an Asgardian.”

“I wasn’t just doing it for him.”

“No. But you could have finished this and put an end to him, and he would not have stopped you, and no one would have blamed you. That he is here now has shown everyone in Asgard as well as among your friends here that you are both stronger and kinder than you wish people to know.”

Clint chuckled. “Don’t tell anyone. If people start saying I’ve gone soft, my rep will be ruined.”

Thor wrapped him up in his arms and slid his hands down to pull their bodies closer, and Clint let his head fall back so Thor’s warm tongue could find the sensitive places in the hollow of his throat. He realized that he was arching up, seeking more contact for his desperately hard cock where it was pressed into Thor’s hip, and felt Thor’s big hands tightly gripping his ass. 

“I desire you…”

“I noticed,” Clint murmured, tangling his hands in the increasingly disheveled blond hair. 

“What do you want?”

Clint glanced at the dresser. “The collar.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah.”

Thor asked no more questions, but reached for the drawer, and in a moment the familiar soft leather was against his throat, the cold metal of the buckle warming against his skin. He closed his eyes and felt his mind start to slide into that other place, a place that was quiet and still and ready. Thor’s fingers brushed across his cheek. 

“Why?” he asked. 

Clint felt a smile tug at the corners of his mouth, an easy smile, one he didn’t have to fight. 

“Because it makes me yours.”

Thor pressed his lips to Clint’s throat above the leather. 

“You want to be mine?”

“This is how I let myself be yours.”

“It is a gift I swear I will never misuse, my Hawk.”

“I know.”

Then it was nothing but their bodies together, interrupted only by Thor reaching over to rummage in the drawer, and when he came back his fingers were slick and were sliding down to press carefully inward. Clint drew a sharp breath; Thor had big hands and he didn’t always go straight for two fingers at once, but he could feel the electricity starting to jump between them again, the current shivering over his skin. He could feel Thor’s breath, sharp and heavy, trying to balance his desire with his responsibility to Clint, and there had been times when he would have been just as happy to have Thor take him without bothering to prepare him and would have taken pleasure in the pain it caused, but neither of them needed any pain today. Thor worked him open with care, tormenting him with rough fingertips caressing over the places inside him that made white spots flash behind his eyelids and made his hips rise up off the bed and made him gasp fragments of words. 

The intensity only increased when the electricity began to seep into Thor’s fingers, the ones inside Clint and the ones resting against the collar around his throat. Clint realized he was shaking and managed to get his hands up to push Thor back, forcing himself to put together a semi-coherent sentence. Thor laughed breathlessly and shifted his hips, and Clint braced himself because it wasn’t ever really possible to be completely prepared for this part and there was always a burning and stretch that left him gasping. Then Thor was moving and the discomfort slid into the desperate need to have as much of him as possible and as hard as possible, ignoring Thor’s muttered warning about being careful and noticing that Thor was having trouble heeding his own warning, because everywhere they touched it felt like live wires had been laid across Clint’s skin, and his vision was starting to blur, and the release that hit almost without warning seemed to radiate through those invisible wires and take over his entire body, his muscles clenching and back arching. He heard Thor groan, a low rumble in his chest, and felt the last burst of current flash over both of them before they slumped to the bed. 

Thor rested his head on Clint’s chest for a long minute before he opened his eyes and looked up at Clint’s face. 

“Did I hurt you?”

“No more than usual,” Clint said, feeling suddenly very, very tired. 

Thor chuckled and reached up to unbuckle the collar. “I am sorry if I was over-eager…”

“Did you hear anything at any point that sounded like me complaining?”

“I did not,” Thor said, and rolled to settle his body next to Clint’s, reaching for an article of clothing off the floor to tidy them up. Clint yawned, and Thor laughed and kissed him. 

“I believe you have more than earned your rest.”

“Good, because even if I hadn’t, I’m not going to be awake in five minutes.”

“Will you stay here with me?”

“Of course I will. Going somewhere else would be too much work.”

“Captain Steve will not mind being responsible for Loki until someone else comes to assist him?”

Clint shook his head. “I don’t think so. I think he sort of gets it, some of it. How you treat someone who used to be an enemy when the war is over and they don’t have any fight left.”

“Little Hawk, it is never safe to believe that my brother has no fight left…”

“I hope he has some,” Clint said. “I don’t know how you live if you don’t have any fight left.”

He raised his head and looked at Thor, his eyes suddenly awake and alert. 

“You have to make me a promise.”

Thor frowned. “What is it?”

“You have to promise me that even if you’re still mad about what Loki did to me… or what we did together, or any of it… that you won’t take it out on him. I had my chance to take it out on him, and I realized there was no reason to. So promise me you won’t. I know you think he played with something that was yours… but I went to him. He didn’t take anything that I didn’t offer. So if you’re still pissed off about that, it’s between me and you. Not between you and him.”

Thor sighed. “Tell me there will be no more of it, then. I cannot…”

“There won’t be.”

“Then yes, I will promise this,” Thor said. “And if I feel anger, I will think instead that whatever happened, it meant that in the end, both my Hawk and my brother were returned to me, which is more than I dared to hope I would find on my return.”

“It worked,” Clint said, letting his head rest against Thor’s shoulder. “Not sure how, but it worked. We’re both here, even if the team thinks I’m nuts for bringing him back.”

“Considering the events since I met you, my friend, I suspect that they are already quite certain that you are nuts.”

“True,” he said, yawning. “But this isn’t going to help.”

 

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	29. Chapter 29

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Loki seems to be able to answer all Natasha's questions, at least for the moment. He doesn't do so well at his usual technique of pissing people off, though... of course, he hasn't tried to pick a fight with Tony yet. 
> 
> .  
> .  
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Steve looked up at the now-familiar hiss of the automatic door; it was the first sound he’d heard for hours other than Loki’s even breathing. 

“JARVIS, raise the lights,” Natasha said. 

The room brightened, and Steve couldn’t help but notice that even with only a few hours of sleep she looked sharp and alert. Her face and plain, fitted black outfit meant business, and she gave Steve a quick nod before turning toward the bed. 

“Time for Sunshine to wake up,” she said. “Fury’s royally pissed and he’s being leaned on hard by other people who are even more royally pissed, and I need to get some answers.”

“Did you talk to Clint?”

Natasha’s lips narrowed. “Clint is not being cooperative. Which is great, since if they find out he brought Loki back here on purpose instead of Loki bringing himself, they’re going to have his ass on a plate.”

Steve glanced toward the bed, and found bright green eyes looking back at him through a tangle of dark hair. 

“He’s awake.”

“Sit up,” Natasha said. “I need to talk to you.”

Loki sat up and leaned back against the headboard, rubbing his face. “May I have some clothing, Agent Romanov?”

“After I get the answers I need to shut down some of the heat that’s coming down on us because of you, we’ll make sure you get some clothes and a shower and something to eat. But I’ve got major problems right now and they need dealt with first.”

“Fair enough,” he said. “I assume many people are quite unhappy that I’m here.”

“That would be an accurate statement.”

“What do you need to ask me?”

“JARVIS, establish formal recording protocol for the following discussion.”

“Yes, ma’am. Formal recording protocol established. Location of recording session is Tower Guest Room 863. Present in recording session are Special Agent Natasha Romanov, Captain Steve Rogers, and the non-human resident of Asgard presently identified by the title of Loki. All present will please verbally confirm for the recording.”

“Special Agent Natasha Romanov, present.”

“Captain Steve Rogers, present.”

Loki smiled and shook his head. “Non-human former Asgardian resident currently known as Loki, present.”

“Visual and verbal confirmation established. You may proceed.”

“How very formal,” Loki said. 

“This is an official S.H.I.E.L.D. interrogation and is property of the agency,” Natasha said, glancing at Steve to make sure he understood. “We’re going to stick to the questions I ask you and you’re going to answer them honestly and directly. Failure to do so will severely jeopardize the agency’s willingness to proceed further.”

“Proceed further with what?” Loki asked, raising his eyebrows. 

“Deciding whether it’s possible for you to be useful to the agency as opposed to a threat.”

“I see,” he said, with something like his familiar smirk. “Then I suppose I’d better answer correctly.”

“Just don’t make this difficult,” she said. “It really won’t be to your advantage. I know you like being a smartass and I know you like having the upper hand, but right now you don’t have the upper hand and it would be smart for you not to screw this up.”

Steve gave Loki a look and nodded his agreement. 

“Very well,” Loki sighed. “Proceed with your questions. I suppose it would be foolish to ask if Agent Barton could be present for my interrogation?”

“Agent Barton won’t even participate in his own interrogation,” Natasha muttered under her breath. “Besides, Agent Barton’s position in this situation is highly compromised by the uncertain nature of his interactions with you. So we might as well start with that.”

“Oh, yes. Let’s.”

Natasha frowned and looked toward Steve, but he didn’t have any more idea than she did what Loki was up to. 

“Fine. Please describe the nature of your interactions with Agent Barton, starting from the time when you escaped from your holding cell here in the tower before you could be transferred to S.H.I.E.L.D. custody.”

Loki grinned. “Ah, yes. That was a fine escape. I’m sure you’re still trying to figure out how I did it, with all of your security and…”

“Answer the question.”

“Technically, that wasn’t a question…”

“If you don’t do what Agent Romanov says, we’re shipping you back to Asgard and letting them decide how to deal with you, and it doesn’t sound like you want that,” Steve interrupted. 

Loki’s grin lost some of its enthusiasm. “Very well. My interactions with Agent Barton. Having escaped from your custody, and knowing that I would be killed on sight if I attempted to return to Asgard, I remained here on Earth, as I believe your agency already knows. I pursued contact with Agent Barton because I knew enough about him that I felt certain I could persuade him to at least talk to me. If you need it stated for the record, Agent Barton didn’t ask me to seek contact with him.”

“His disappearance from the hospital?”

“I realized I had put his ability to remain an active agent in jeopardy. I took him somewhere where I knew I could contact my one remaining ally in Asgard and ask her to heal him, which she did. I returned him…”

“But you kept following him.”

“I was lonely, Agent Romanov,” he said, holding up his hands. “Is that so hard to believe? Agent Barton would be of no use to me in some drastic attempt to claim the throne of Asgard or take my place ruling over Earth. He was the only contact I had with anyone who wouldn’t either kill or attempt to arrest me on sight.”

“Is it correct that Agent Barton sought you out and spent time with you in the hotel where you were residing?” Natasha asked. 

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because I lured him there,” Loki said, looking back at her steadily. “I wanted his company, so I pretended to know things I didn’t. I pretended I had information that might have been valuable to him. I lied. I had nothing for him. When he discovered this, I realized he would turn on me and never return… so I took him. He apparently knew that this was a possibility, since he took your tracking device…”

“And what happened while you two were away from Earth?”

“Agent Barton showed mercy,” he said. “He could have killed me. I would not have objected. He could have sent me back to Asgard to die at my father’s hands for my crimes. I would not have objected. He chose to let me live. He chose to help me.”

Steve saw the slight shift in Natasha’s shoulders as some of the tension lifted; she’d wanted to start the interrogation with Clint because if Loki was going to throw Clint under the bus, she’d wanted to know from the beginning.

“I made Agent Barton believe I had information he needed,” Loki said. “Information that would have been important to all of you, to the fate of many.”

“You don’t actually have any such information?”

“No. But I had to make him believe I had something he needed.”

“Thank you,” Natasha said, and only someone who knew Natasha extremely well would hear the slight shift in her tone that made it more than just a formal statement. “I have other questions.”

“Carry on.”

“What are your intentions on Earth?”

Loki looked genuinely puzzled. “I don’t honestly know. I have no intentions. I know you have no reason to believe anything I say… but I expected Agent Barton to kill me. I did not deserve his mercy and I was not prepared for it. I did not expect to be here. So I’m afraid, Agent Romanov, that I really don’t have an answer for you.”

“Reports from Asgard stated that they stripped you of as many of your powers as they could. I need you to give me a complete list of the powers that you still have. Anything that you’re able to do that an ordinary human can’t do.”

“I retain physical strength, extended lifespan, and rapid healing ability far in excess of what humans possess.”

“Can you still change your appearance and create illusions?”

“I can. That is inherent to my nature. They could not take it from me.”

“What else?”

“I possess elemental powers… some degree of control over elemental forces. I was strongly discouraged from using these all my life, as it was evidence that I was not truly the child of Asgard I was told I was. I do not know the extent of these abilities, but I know they could not be taken from me… if they could, Odin would have taken them a long time ago. They are part of my true nature, the one that was hidden from me.”

“Anything else?”

“I am a superb liar,” he said, smiling wryly. “Which, obviously, calls all previous statements into doubt, but if I failed to admit it…”

“That’s not really a super power. If it was, Stark would have to be classified as superhuman, and then he’d be really intolerable. What else have you got?”

He held up his hands. “As it stands now, I believe that is all I have. There is the inevitable chaos that seems to follow wherever I go, but I don’t know that I can claim it, since I do not control it and it often harms me as much as anyone else.”

Natasha nodded. “What can you tell me about Thanos?”

“I know he does not appreciate my mishandling of the Tesseract. I know he has put a bounty on my head. I also know that there are larger bounties on other heads, and that Thanos has bigger plans than revenge on me. He wants the Tesseract back from Asgard, and I am no longer in a position to do anything to prevent that… but Thor is. If Thanos sent someone to Earth at this point, I think it more likely that they would be here to kill my brother as part of an attack on Asgard than to kill me out of petty revenge and a small bounty.”

Steve raised his eyebrows when Natasha looked over at him; this was a possibility they hadn’t considered, although it seemed to make sense that if Thanos still had plans for the Tesseract, Loki wasn’t doing much to interfere with them, but Thor might. 

“It needs to be formally stated,” she said, turning back to Loki, “that any use of your powers, including shape-changing or taking the form of other people, even for a joke, will be viewed by S.H.I.E.L.D. as a potential violation of our agreement.”

“And what agreement is that?” Loki asked, amused. 

“The one where you get to stay here and we treat you decently while S.H.I.E.L.D. decides whether you’re too risky to keep around.”

“Ahh. Excellent. Considering that they accepted a brainwashed Russian agent with an extremely questionable history, a scientist with a tendency to turn into a creature of mass destruction, a former circus clown, a historical relic, and a former arms dealer with blatant issues with authority, it seems like my chances are at least fair.”

“For the record, Agent Barton was never a clown.”

“I stand corrected. Do you have any other questions for me?”

“No. JARVIS, please conclude this recording and end protocol.”

“Yes, Agent Romanov. Would you like me to forward the recording to Director Fury?”

“Please do.”

“Thank you. The recording is now complete.”

“JARVIS… go off record.”

“Off-record, ma’am.”

“Make sure the rest of the team hears that recording, immediately, in case Fury or someone else calls to double-check any of it. That means Clint and Thor need to stop whatever they’re doing and pay attention, since this involves them more than anybody…”

“I will wake them immediately.”

Natasha turned to Loki. 

“You lied about why Clint came looking for you.”

“Yes,” he said evenly, meeting her gaze. “Would you have preferred the truth?”

“That’s the thing about this team,” she said. “We lie for each other. We cover for each other. We make ridiculous excuses for each other. We put ourselves at risk for each other. Because… it’s what we do.”

“I imagine it would take some time to learn to trust a team, after being trained not to trust anyone,” Loki said. 

“You knew you could have thrown Clint to the wolves when I asked you those questions.”

“I have nothing to lose. What little I do have, right here, right now, I owe to him.”

“How do we know you won’t turn on us if we let you stay?”

“You don’t,” he said. “I cannot promise that. It would be a lie to pretend I could. I can only tell you that at this moment, I have no one and nothing else to turn to.”

She nodded. “Good. If you’d said anything else, I’d have known you were bullshitting me. That’s at least an answer I believe. Steve… can you please show him where the soap and everything in the bathroom is, and I’ll go see about finding him some clothes and something to eat?”

“Sure,” Steve said, standing up. “I can do that. When do I need to put a call in to Fury?”

“Don’t. He’ll process what I gave him, feed it to the higher-ups, and then come back to us with what he wants next. This is his game now. I think we gave him what he needed to play ball.”

 

 

 

When Loki emerged from the bathroom, his black hair sleek and wet, Steve was standing by the door with an armful of clothes. 

“Natasha just dropped these off. She said she’s not sure what will fit. She went up to the kitchen to see what there is to eat… usually when Thor is around he puts a pretty big dent in the snack supplies, but when he’s been gone for a while he and Clint… sorry.”

Loki adjusted the towel around his waist. “No apologies necessary. I’m aware of my brother’s habit of entertaining himself with Agent Barton.”

Steve set the clothes down on the bed. “I don’t think it’s just entertainment.”

Loki rummaged through the pile and lifted up a pair of jeans. “More than that, is it? My brother does have a habit of becoming overly fond of humans.”

“Is that a bad thing?” Steve asked. 

Loki shrugged. “Only when they age and die in what seems to us like a few heartbeats. Thor’s human friends will be in their graves before he has even aged what would be a year to you. Well, not to you, with your serum and your healing abilities.”

“If you’re trying to get under my skin, it won’t work,” Steve said, picking up a T-shirt that looked like it would fit Loki. “When they unfroze me, almost everyone I’d known before was dead.”

“Yes, but this time, you’ll have to watch it happen, won’t you?”

Steve handed him the shirt. “You can stop trying to bait me. I already know that. I’m going to age much more slowly than everyone around me. I’m going to lose them all, eventually. But that’s not what’s important. What’s important is that I could lose them all tomorrow. So every day matters. And every day is all that matters.”

Loki pulled on the jeans and frowned at how they sagged around his hips. Steve tossed him a belt. 

“We’ll take you out and get you some stuff that fits eventually.”

“You don’t anger easily, Captain.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Would it be more effective if I mentioned Agent Romanov? I suspected it even in the lab when she was playing the grieving widow next to Agent Barton’s dying body, but watching you two together while she questioned me certainly gave it away.”

“Gave what away? It isn’t a secret.”

“It’s common knowledge that the pure and wholesome Captain America is allowing himself to be tainted by a little Russian temptress? I would…”

“I thought you’d be better at this.”

Loki cocked his head and studied him for a moment. “I usually am.”

“There aren’t any secrets here,” Steve said. “Even if you try to keep them, it doesn’t work. So we just don’t. I know more about what the rest of my team does in bed… and other places… than I ever wanted to, but that’s the way it is. If you think you’re going to be able to get under anybody’s skin around here by nagging at us about our personal business… we don’t have personal business. Before you even start on this thing about Natasha, I’ll tell you right now that no, she doesn’t love me, and she’s never going to, and that’s the way it is. The only person I know she loves is Clint, and you already knew that, and if you try to play with her about Clint, she’ll hurt you, but you’re welcome to try. Tony likes to argue and he’ll do it all day but he’ll forget about it ten minutes later when he thinks of a new project. Bruce doesn’t get mad, because bad things happen when he gets mad, and the Other Guy has learned how to stay in the background so he doesn’t hurt us. I’m sure you know how to piss off your brother, and I don’t even know what’s going on with you and Clint, but you’re not going to bait me into playing your game, so you might as well give up.”

“Well, then,” Loki said. “Apparently I shall have to find new forms of entertainment.”

Steve pulled his cell phone out of his pocket. “Maybe Tony will give you one of these. They’re actually kind of fun… but you didn’t hear me say that.”

Loki pulled the shirt over his head and sat down on the bed. “Do you think they actually intend to let me stay here?”

“At least if you’re here, the only people on Earth who already beat you once will be around to keep an eye on you. Besides, Fury has a way of looking at trouble and seeing potential… Natasha and Clint were both his projects, and he managed to bring Bruce and Tony to the team even though both of them thought it was a bad idea and so did a lot of other people.”

“Are you suggesting Director Fury is secretly an optimist?”

Steve chuckled. “I wouldn’t go that far. He just knows how to find heroes in places other people don’t go looking.”

“Captain Rogers,” JARVIS said. “Agent Romanov wants to know if you think your charge is prepared to join the team for dinner. She says that there is apparently no food in the tower because everyone has been too busy to send out a grocery order, but she will order takeout food and have it delivered.”

“Dinner with the team?” Loki asked. “You know, if I’m being held as a prisoner, it certainly doesn’t feel like it.”

“Who said you were being held as a prisoner?” Steve said. “You’re free to go any time you want. Clint brought you here and left it for us to figure out what to do with you. So we’re figuring it out. And in the mean time, we’re going to have dinner. And I hope you like spicy food because when Natasha gets to pick she always orders Thai and she always gets everything extra hot.”

Loki looked at him blankly. 

“Dinner?” Steve repeated.

“Yes,” Loki said, shaking his head as if to clear it. “Of course.”

“If you look under the bed, most of the guest rooms have a couple of pairs of slippers. One of them should fit well enough. The floor in the living room is cold.”

“I don’t feel cold,” Loki said. 

“Well, you might want to put them on anyway, because Tony doesn’t like feet and he yells at anyone who isn’t at least wearing socks.”

“Oh,” Loki responded, still dazed, as he pulled a pair of slippers from under the bed. 

“By the way… if you ever want to use that foot thing to mess with Tony… just don’t tell him you heard about it from me.”

Loki snapped back to awareness and grinned. “I never divulge the sources of my privileged information.”

“Good plan. Are you ready?”

“I… don’t know. I suppose so. It’s been a long time since I had dinner with anyone.”

“It’s not exactly a formal affair. Tony will probably get drunk, and Natasha will harass Clint about what he spent half the day doing and he’ll complain and Thor will laugh about it and slap his butt, and Bruce will argue about how no one around here likes any good movies.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad.”

“It can get a little old,” Steve said, smiling. “But that’s okay.”

 

.  
.  
.


	30. Chapter 30

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Brothers argue. Apparently this isn't any different for Asgardian brothers. Hopefully, this won't become a problem. Like, the kind of problem where lots of things get broken.   
> .  
> .  
> .

“Anyway,” Tony said, reaching for a container of Pad Thai, “I was thinking that maybe you’d let me test some things out on you… science. You know. I want to do a study and compare the results of the serum they used on Captain Tightpants over there and the natural physical traits…”

Loki glanced at Steve, who was sitting next to him on the couch and listening to everything. 

“Does he always go on and on like this?”

“Yes,” Steve said. 

“He doesn’t really even care if you’re listening or not,” Bruce said. “And whatever kind of tests he wants to do, I wouldn’t if I were you. He already tried this line on Thor and he wouldn’t have anything to do with it.”

“It’s for science,” Tony muttered, looking slightly insulted. 

“And does he always call you Captain Tightpants?” Loki asked.

Steve shrugged. “That or something worse. Did you get enough to eat?”

“Yes… there seems to be quite a lot of food left, though.”

Natasha rolled her eyes. “That’s because I was assuming that Clint and the Asgardian Eating Machine would be joining us, but apparently they’ve got better things to do.”

“Clint said they were coming,” Bruce mentioned, grabbing a container before it could fall off the table as Tony shuffled things around. 

“JARVIS, get Clint and the Bottomless Stomach for us.”

“Of course, ma’am.”

Loki smiled slightly. “My brother has a reputation even at the tables of Asgard for being a prodigious eater.”

The voice that came over the speaker was Clint’s. 

“What?”

“We’re having dinner,” Natasha said. “You two were expected.”

“Got side-tracked,” Clint mumbled. “Be there in a few.”

Natasha crossed her arms and looked over at Bruce. Tony caught the look between them and frowned. 

“What? No secrets.”

“He didn’t sound right,” Bruce said. 

Natasha shook her head. “No. And Clint could sound perfectly normal even if he was tied up and being tortured. So…”

“If they’re not up here in ten minutes, I’ll go check on them,” Bruce said. 

“Okay. But even if they are… has Thor talked to Loki yet?”

“I haven’t seen him yet,” Loki said. 

“Thor came in while he was still sleeping,” Steve said. 

Natasha’s head snapped up. “Was Clint there? Did they say anything? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I thought if you wanted to hear a conversation you just had JARVIS play it back for you,” Tony said. “Isn’t that why you hacked him in the first place?”

She silenced him with a sharp look before turning back to Loki and Steve. 

“It seemed like a private conversation,” Steve said. 

“Well, it’s not. Nothing around here is private and you know it. What did Thor say? I know it was something personal or you wouldn’t be trying to avoid telling me. You know I can just get JARVIS to play the whole thing.”

Steve sighed. “Thor wanted to take Clint off with him, and Clint sort of put him against a wall about going to Asgard and trying to make them keep Loki away from him, and Thor said it was because he wanted to keep Clint safe, and Clint… kind of made him admit that he really, really didn’t like thinking about Loki getting his hands on Clint, and…”

“And what?”

Steve glanced at Loki. He shrugged. 

“Nothing I hear will distress me at this point, Captain. You’ve been more than kind in trying to protect me, but I’m prepared for my brother’s wrath.”

“Thor said he couldn’t share him with Loki, and Clint said he didn’t have to and… that wasn’t going to happen anymore, and they left. And Clint was very willing to go, so Thor didn’t drag him off in a rage or anything,” Steve explained. 

“Yeah. I’m not thinking Thor’s gotten over being jealous quite that fast,” Natasha said. 

“He’d never hurt Clint,” Tony argued. “Well, I mean… except for…”

“No, but I’m guessing based on the way he reacted when he found out about Loki and Clint in the first place, he’s got a tendency to be a little possessive of what’s his.”

Loki chuckled and shook his head. “A little? He has never been any different. I could send him into a fury when we were children just by playing with one of his toys.”

Natasha scowled. “And of all the toys, you had to play with this one.”

“Hey,” Steve interrupted. “Clint brought Loki back here. That’s on him.”

“Captain Tightpants actually has an excellent point,” Tony said. “Clint’s the one who decided to go play with Loki, not the other way around. Well, I mean… we’re talking about post-Tesseract here. Everything before that was…”

“Fucked up?” Bruce suggested. 

“Extremely,” Tony agreed. “But since then… I mean, I don’t know what exactly was going on, but it doesn’t exactly sound like Clint was fighting it.”

“You told him things,” Bruce said, turning to Loki. “You told him you had things for him. I don’t know what you offered him…”

“Things I did not have,” Loki said, lowering his eyes. “Things I thought I could give him. I was wrong.”

“And is that when Clint ended up back here under some kind of spell, and then when he came out of it went looking for you and said he had to finish things?”

“Yes.”

There was a soft beep as the elevator arrived, a feature Steve had requested after walking in on one too many incidents of questionable activity in various parts of the building. Of course, for this to be effective, the beep would have to signal the participants in said activities to cease them, which they never did, so Steve walked in on just as much smut as ever, if not slightly more because Tony liked knowing how much it irritated him. This time, though, everyone actually went silent and made sure they were busy eating and staring at the TV when Clint and Thor walked in. 

Natasha was very good at watching things without looking at them, and it only took a few sideways glances to read the things she needed to know immediately: nothing in Clint’s body language hinted even to her trained eye that he was anxious or under duress, although he was moving rather gingerly and looked fairly exhausted. Thor followed a few steps behind him, refusing to look at the group, and she couldn’t decide how to read the tension across his shoulders or the scowl on his face. 

“You’re lucky we left you guys anything,” Tony said. “Bruce was pretty hungry.”

Clint grinned. “Yeah. Eating for two, right, Bruce? Sorry. Lost track of time.”

Natasha let her gaze flick to Loki for a brief moment. He was staring at Thor, but his expression was unreadable, so she turned back to Clint. 

“You look a little rough,” she said. 

He rubbed his head and looked at the ceiling. “Umm. Yeah.”

“What, Thor had to make up for lost time?” Tony needled, and while there were times Natasha sincerely wished she had a switch to shut off Tony’s mouth, this time she silently thanked him, because his tactless questioning was exactly what she needed. 

Thor glared at him. “We don’t need to discuss this over dinner.”

“Since when? Last I checked, you’d discuss fucking Clint over anything… and you can take that any way you want to. I mean…”

“It’s not necessary to discuss it now,” Thor almost growled. 

“Why? You embarrassed that you gave him a little too much and now he can’t walk straight? It’s not the first time…”

Clint’s eyes widened slightly. “Tony, shut it.”

“I said…” Thor began, and Natasha could see his hands clenched into fists. She expected either Tony or Clint to interrupt him, but the quiet, smooth voice that broke in was not one she expected. 

“Be at ease, brother. I am finished with fighting you for the things that are yours.”

Thor looked up and met Loki’s eyes. “You lie. You have always lied.”

“There’s no point in denying that,” Loki said. “But you trust your friend, don’t you? You shame him by suggesting that he would lie to you.”

Tony noticed just a hint of green behind Bruce’s eyes, but he sat still with his hands on his knees and waited. Thor seemed to be trying to drill lightning through Loki with his glare. 

Clint grabbed Thor’s arm. 

“Hey!”

Thor shook him off. Clint grabbed him again. 

“I’m talking to you!”

Thor rumbled and turned his head slightly. “I hear you.”

“Do I have to remind you?”

“This is not…”

“You promised,” Clint said, loud and clear enough that everyone heard it. “You break your promises now? Are you the liar?”

The muscles in Thor’s arms shifted under the skin, but then he looked away from the others and his shoulders slumped. 

“I keep my promises, little Hawk.”

“I know you do. We all know you do.”

Thor glanced at Loki. “He is a liar. He is a destroyer. He wants everything, and what he cannot have he ruins. You should not have brought him here.”

“It wasn’t your call to make,” Clint said. “It was mine and I made it. S.H.I.E.L.D. will decide what to do with him, and we’ll respect that, and if you don’t like it, you can go back to Asgard, because I’m pretty sure you won’t have to worry about running into him there.”

Thor’s face flushed. “You wish me to leave?”

“No, idiot. No one wishes you to leave,” Clint said sharply. “We want you to calm down and come eat some dinner and stop giving your brother death glares and trust the team to handle this and trust me when I told you it was done!”

“I see,” Thor said, and his voice had gone very quiet. “You are right. My brother spoke the truth. I wrong you by letting myself think as though you could not be trusted. I do trust you. I do not trust Loki, but I will sit and share a meal with him, and I will trust my team in their decisions.”

Clint grabbed his hand and pulled him toward the couch. “I know I made you work hard enough to be hungry.”

Thor attempted to smile. “That is true. And I see that Natasha has made sure to order my favorite things…”

“What, you mean all of them?” Tony asked. “Have you ever eaten anything you didn’t like?”

Loki muffled a laugh, and all eyes turned to him. 

“What?” Tony asked. 

“When we were children, a queen from another realm came to meet with Odin. I believe she was attempting to arrange a royal betrothal for her young daughter, and of course she had her eye on Thor. She had brought all sorts of exotic fruits, things we’d never tasted before, and Odin sent them to the kitchen to be prepared. And my brother, unable to resist the temptation, snuck into the kitchen and stole one of the fruits. He had no idea they had to be cooked thoroughly to be edible. It caused him… tremendous discomfort, and no small amount of embarrassment, as he was unable to attend dinner and the queen was most displeased…”

Tony grinned. “So even demigods get the shits.”

“It’s true,” Thor said, shaking his head and trying not to laugh. “Father was not amused.”

“The maid who had to wash your clothes was even less amused,” Loki noted. 

“You don’t even want to know what the maids here have to deal with,” Tony said. “I pay them extremely well. They deserve it. By the way, have you ever had beanie weenies?”

Loki raised his eyebrows. Thor burst out laughing. 

“We must prepare them for him.”

“No,” Natasha said. 

“Oh, yes,” Clint insisted. “Like, tomorrow.”

“Fine. Then I’m going out. For the entire day. Fuck all of you.”

She handed Thor a plate, and he took it and sat down, reaching for the food. Clint walked past her to sit by Bruce and Tony, and as he passed, he ran a finger lightly against the back of her neck, so quickly that no one else noticed. It wouldn’t have meant anything to them if they had, but Natasha and Clint had their own signals, ones that had evolved during many missions and the times between, and she knew that one meant that he wasn’t just pretending, that everything really was all right. For a moment she wanted to grab his hand and hold it; she hadn’t let herself feel the knot in her chest that had been there since he left, and now she felt it slowly start to unwind. 

“You’re an asshole,” she said. 

He patted her shoulder. “Likewise. Good to be back.”

 

 

 

 

As the evening went on, the discussion seemed to settle into an almost normal rhythm, broken only when someone glanced over at Loki to see what he was doing. In general, he seemed to be doing nothing, but Natasha could see that he was carefully taking note of everything that was said, every gesture, every look between teammates. She couldn’t necessarily assume any sinister motive for it; she would be doing exactly the same thing among strangers she might or might not be able to trust. He knew she was watching him, and occasionally gave her a small, amused smile. She took note of exactly how long his eyes lingered on each team member, which words drew his attention, which conversations kept his interest. 

She pulled out her phone and sent a quick text message to Tony, since he was the one who was always playing with his phone anyway and therefore the least likely for Loki to take note of it.

KNOWS I’M WATCHING HIM. GOING TO STEP OUT FOR A FEW. WATCH ON MONITORS IN LAB. YOU WATCH CLINT. 

Tony looked up at her, over at Clint, and then went back to playing on his phone as if nothing had happened. She stood up. 

“If you’ll excuse me, gentlemen.”

“You’re bailing out early,” Clint said. 

“I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

“You’re the one who ordered everything extra spicy, and now you’re the one running for the bathroom?”

“You’re not supposed to ask women about bathroom things,” Tony said. “Even I know that, and I’m the socially handicapped one.”

“Saying you’re the socially handicapped one in this crew is like saying you’re the hairy one in a group of gorillas,” Natasha said. “Don’t do anything stupid while I’m gone.”

“Actually,” Clint said, making sure she was almost but not quite to the elevator, “now that she’s gone, we should think of something really especially stupid to do.”

Bruce gave him a sideways look. “Clint, I’m pretty sure that in the last couple of days you’ve completely reset our entire machinery for measuring levels of stupid. You’re gonna have to give us at least a week to recalibrate it before you start again.”

Tony snorted, and Clint failed in his attempt to look offended. Thor, though, didn’t laugh, and although he’d been ignoring Loki, he couldn’t help but give him a sharp glare. 

“I know how badly you wish to say something.”

Loki raised his eyebrows. “Considering that as a result of Agent Barton’s actions, I am not only alive but sitting here enjoying your company and this fine cuisine, I cannot personally view his actions as stupid. However, I can certainly see how those who do not approve of my presence might view them otherwise.”

“Thor, he’s here,” Steve said. “I haven’t gotten any instructions from S.H.I.E.L.D., but if they were going to order him back to Asgard, they probably already would have.”

“Perhaps their utter failure in keeping me imprisoned did not convince your agency that they should have another opportunity to do so,” Loki suggested. 

“You tricked your way free,” Thor muttered. 

“I didn’t have to bother, actually. I just waited for one of the guards to do something stupid. It didn’t take very long.”

Thor started to say something, but Clint punched him in the arm. “Stop it. Fuck. You guys are like little kids. You can’t do this forever, and even if you could, we’d all get tired of it and throw you both out. He’s just sitting there, and you’re the one getting all pissed off thinking you know what he wants to say…”

“I do know. He always…”

“No. Nobody ‘always’ anything,” Clint argued. “Nobody. Not even you. Not even… hell, not even Steve. There’s no ‘always’. Not for humans, not for you guys, not for anybody.”

“Except JARVIS,” Tony added, with his mouth full. 

“He’s a computer,” Clint snapped. 

“No offense, JARVIS,” Tony said. 

“None taken, sir. I consider it a compliment. Agent Barton is entirely correct in that human behavior is almost entirely unpredictable for any complex set of circumstances, due to the drastic emotional and psychological effects that minor variables can have on human responses to stimuli. It would be incorrect to assume that it was possible to make long-term predictions regarding specific behaviors…”

“What if I predict that I’m going to get laid tonight?” Tony asked. 

“First of all, sir, that is not a specific behavior. Second, by making that statement in the presence of the individuals you presumably intend to engage in that behavior with, you have affected their likelihood of engaging in said behavior and altered the variables…”

“Loki will lie,” Thor said. “That is not in question.”

“That is also not a specific behavior,” JARVIS replied. “It is a widely variable group of behaviors with widely divergent intentions and consequences. All of you lie regularly and consistently. You may not be aware of it, but in the broad sense that a lie is any act of deception or withholding of information, all of you lie on a regular basis. If you would like me to attempt to calculate the average number…”

“Ummm… probably better if you don’t do that, JARVIS,” Tony said. “I don’t think mine would surprise anyone but you might give us a shock about Captain Tightass.”

“You know when I said I didn’t care if you called me stupid things like that?” Steve said. “That would count as one.”

“This team is about trust,” Thor rumbled. “Not about deception.”

Bruce shook his head. “Tony lies to me constantly. Even about where random stupid things are in the lab. He forgets where he put them, so he lies. He lies about what he’s working on because he doesn’t want me nosing in on it. He lies about how much sleep he’s gotten. He lies about how many drinks he’s had. He’d lie about how old he was if I didn’t already know. But you know what? If I need him and I ask him for help, I know none of that will matter. The only thing that will matter is that he’ll be there, and he’ll do anything he has to do, including putting himself in danger, to help me. As far as I’m concerned, that’s trust. If he wants to lie to me about nine things out of ten, and the one thing he’s not lying about is the one where he promises I can count on him, that’s the only one I care about.”

“Clint lies out his ass AND tries to get himself killed,” Tony pointed out. 

Clint shrugged. “Guilty.”

“What is your point?” Thor demanded. 

“That Loki may be a compulsive liar and he may be really good at ending up in the middle of various kinds of disasters, but when it comes to this team, the first one’s an optional bonus trait and the second one’s a requirement,” Tony said. “I’m up for giving the guy a chance. If he proves me wrong, I guess it’s on me.”

“I brought him back here,” Clint said. “It’s on me. And that’s fine. Because if what I saw and what I know was all a trick, I deserve whatever I get. But I don’t think it was. And I don’t think I’m wrong. And you… you saw.”

Thor lowered his head. 

“Yeah. She showed you. Would you have looked at the things he did a little differently if you’d known then what you know now?”

“I would not have allowed…”

“That’s not the point. Knowing that doesn’t change anything?”

“It makes me understand why he is so twisted,” Thor said. “But it does not make his betrayals any less painful.”

“Nor does it ease the sting of yours, brother,” Loki said, his voice low. 

“I never betrayed you.”

“You betrayed me a thousand times. A thousand times you turned your back on me to celebrate your victories and leave me in the cold. A thousand times you stood by while Odin shamed me in front of the entire court for things I could not stop myself from doing. A thousand…”

“Stop,” Thor said, raising his hand, his face pained. “If I swear that I will strive with all my heart to forgive your betrayals, will you swear that you will do the same?”

“I swear it,” Loki said. “And I swear that I will do my best to bring no harm, nor allow any harm to reach, any member of this team as long as I am among them. I know it is the vow of a liar, but even liars must stand for something.”

Thor rested a hand on Clint’s shoulder. 

“Perhaps you did do something to change him.”

“He listened,” Loki said. “Even after I hurt him, he came back, and he listened. That in itself was enough.”

Tony glanced at Bruce, and Bruce grinned at him and patted his head. 

“It does something. Having someone who listens,” Tony said, his voice rough. 

“I don’t listen to all of it,” Bruce said. “I’d go insane. You talked about your plan for expandable Hulk armor for three straight days and I started tuning you out after the first four hours.”

Tony shrugged. “Maybe it’s good if it’s someone who knows when to not listen, too.”

“Or knows when you’re full of shit and it’s time to call your bluff,” Clint said, and Thor lowered his head and grinned. 

“Only when necessary, little Hawk.”

Steve leaned back against the couch and wondered what it would be like to have someone understand him like that. Loki sat in silence, his face without expression. 

 

 

 

Natasha leaned her elbows on the table and looked up at the screen in front of her. 

“What have you got?”

“Based on the S.H.I.E.L.D. behavioral analysis program you provided, I performed the calculations you requested.”

“And?”

“How much information do you want?”

She thought about it for a moment; the behavioral analysis program had been designed for a level of AI that S.H.I.E.L.D. didn’t have yet, but JARVIS was more than capable of it. It required a vast number of complex calculations based on analysis of specific gestures, movement of eyes, certain target words or phrases, length of time spent looking at any given object or person, and several dozen other variables, and she didn’t really want to hear all of them.

“Can you give me a breakdown of the level of interest and level of threat profile for Loki?”

“Yes, ma’am. Based on the data, the profile shows his level of interest most directed at Thor. Mr. Stark and Agent Barton attracted nearly the same amount of interest but not as much as Thor, and Captain Rogers and Dr. Banner attracted the least interest.”

She nodded; that was good. She could at least show that part of the report to Fury and let him work with it, since it indicated that Loki didn’t seem to be targeting Bruce to bring out the Hulk, which was always a concern, since they didn’t really have a good way to put the Hulk back. It also showed that he wasn’t fixated to a concerning degree on Clint, and if he was focused on the conflict with Thor, he wasn’t busy scanning the room and plotting something else in the mean time, at least not that the program could tell. 

“Threat profile?”

“No level of threatening behavior was indicated. He showed very few signs of arousal at any part of the conversation except when speaking directly to his brother, and then his physical behaviors and language analysis indicated a defensive mode as opposed to a hostile one.”

“Thor?”

“His attention is almost entirely focused on Loki. This threat profile indicated strong swings between moderately threatening and significantly defensive.”

“Yeah. Didn’t need the program to tell me that. What about Clint?”

“Clint’s highest degree of attention was directed at Thor,” JARVIS said, and Natasha exhaled; that was also good news she could give to Fury, that Clint wasn’t fixated on Loki. 

“What about threat?”

“He displayed very minor threat behaviors toward Thor but they were not registered as significant. He displayed no threat behaviors toward anyone else.”

“Perfect. Thank you, JARVIS.”

“My pleasure, ma’am. I am always happy to be of service. If I may…”

“What?”

“The program did indicate that there is a possibility based on Agent Barton’s lack of normal physical responses throughout the conversation, that he may be either concealing important information from the team or that he may possibly be psychotic.”

“Okay… well, either one of those is totally possible, but let’s leave that part out of the report for now, OK?”

“Of course, ma’am. The program is, after all, still in beta testing and therefore unreliable, so any data that does not conform with other, more valid sources should not be included in a formal report.”

“Did I ever tell you you’re the best thing Tony Stark ever built?”

“No, Agent Romanov, but I am glad to have been of service.”

 

.  
.  
.


	31. Chapter 31

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Natasha is wary. Clint is evasive. Not that this is different from normal. Someone is actually getting information from Steve about his personal life, which is very much not normal. Then everything goes to shit, as it usually does. I'd apologize for the random shift to Steve's character, since he's usually neglected in this story, but I figure if you're still reading this series after going on 80 chapters you're either up for just about anything or you're just skipping the pairings you don't like, because I think I've hit a fair number of them, so hopefully you'll just go along for the ride and it'll end up being worth it. Stupid characters never follow my plans anyway. After all, I'm just the person who types stuff. 
> 
> .  
> .  
> .

Natasha expected to have to pry Clint away from Thor to talk to him before everyone went to bed, but when she caught him stepping out of the elevator he was alone. 

“Clint.”

“Whatever it is, can it wait till tomorrow?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so.”

“You brought Loki back here. What was your plan?”

He shrugged. “Didn’t have one. There was nowhere else to take him.”

“You could’ve taken him back to where he was before. He was getting by…”

“He wasn’t and you know it. You saw the place, because you found the transmitter, so you know he wasn’t.”

“This wasn’t a mercy mission, Clint. And if you wanted him out of your head I don’t see how bringing him here helped.”

He looked up at her. “I don’t know. It just… none of this was anything I planned out.”

“Well, at some point we need a plan, and you’re the one…”

“Agent Romanov?”

She sighed. “Yes, JARVIS?”

“Director Fury wishes to speak with Loki in person tomorrow. He has designated a meeting place outside the city and wishes for Loki to be transported there.”

Clint’s eyes narrowed. “Why can’t he just come here and talk to him?”

“Because last time he came here and tried to get straight answers, the entire team lied out their asses and then Thor electrocuted his equipment,” Natasha reminded him. 

“Oh. Right.”

“JARVIS, where is Loki now?”

“He is with Captain Rogers in the living room. Captain Rogers wishes to know if he should have a guard present for the night.”

“How much do Asgardians sleep?”

“Basing my data on Thor’s sleep patterns, they seem to sleep a few hours each night. Some nights they do not sleep and some nights they sleep quite soundly for some time. It seems likely based on current data that after the extended time spent sleeping earlier today, it could be expected that Loki will probably sleep very little tonight.”

“Then it’s up to Captain Rogers,” Natasha said. “At this point I’m more worried about Thor and Loki getting into it than Loki killing us all in our sleep… that’s really not his style. And if Thor and Loki are going to get into it, the only person physically capable of stopping them is Steve, since letting the Hulk out inside isn’t a good idea and suiting up Tony in the middle of the night when he’s half-drunk isn’t much better.”

“I’ve got tranquilizer arrows,” Clint suggested. 

Natasha glanced at him suspiciously. “And you really think that when you’re the one who knew how pissed off Thor was going to be about all this and brought Loki here anyway, I’m going to put you in charge of keeping them out of trouble? Nice try.”

Clint muttered something under his breath. 

“Captain Rogers states that as he needs very little sleep himself, he is willing to provide our guest with company and prevent any issues that might arise during the night,” JARVIS said. “He also suggests that perhaps he accompany Loki to the meeting with Director Fury tomorrow, as he feels that Agent Romanov would be wise to distance herself from the situation due to Agent Barton’s involvement in it.”

Natasha scowled. “I’m sure he made it sound a little less insulting.”

“He probably did, ma’am, but it is my duty to relay information in a concise manner.”

“What’s your analysis of Captain Rogers’ statements, then?”

JARVIS seemed to consider for a moment. “Your loyalty to Agent Barton is unquestioned. Director Fury is no doubt aware that you will protect him in any way you can, and it is not outside your skill set to, for example, sabotage a simple transport in order to remove Loki from the current situation.”

Clint looked at her and crossed his arms when he realized her expression was more mildly annoyed than infuriated, confirmation that she’d most likely been considering something exactly along those lines. 

“Yeah, well… okay. Fury will trust the whole thing more if Steve takes him anyway. Can you arrange for one of Tony’s drivers… one of the confidential ones… to take them?”

“All of Mr. Stark’s drivers sign confidentiality clauses, ma’am,” JARVIS said. “I will make arrangements and notify Captain Rogers.”

“Where’s the rest of the team?”

“Mr. Stark and Dr. Banner are…”

“Right. Where’s Thor?”

“He is on the roof. He appears to be sitting and looking at the sky.”

“He said he was going to be alone and listen to the universe or something like that,” Clint said. “Maybe the universe will tell him to settle down.”

“If you brought someone back here that had tried to kill me repeatedly, Clint…”

“Ummm… didn’t we try to kill each other repeatedly?”

She fought a smile. “That was different.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah. I didn’t really want to kill you. Most of the time.”

“What do you think Steve and Loki could possibly have to talk about all night?” Clint asked. 

Natasha shrugged. “I have no idea. JARVIS, you’ll be recording, right?”

“I am always recording, Agent Romanov. Unless you instruct me not to. Or unless Mr. Stark instructs me not to. Or unless I receive contradictory instructions from both of you, in which case the recording remains under security lockdown until it is determined whose instructions take precedence.”

“I thought you said your duty was to relay information in a concise manner,” Natasha said. 

Clint grinned. “That’s Tony’s version of ‘concise’. You know how much he likes to run his mouth. You really think he’d program his AI any differently?”

Natasha rolled her eyes. “I’m going to my room to read for a while. You want to record me doing that, go for it. But I want notification of anyone moving around the building tonight, JARVIS. That includes Clint.”

“Where would I be going?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then why…”

“Because you’re still hiding something,” she said. “Even if you don’t know it. And I’m keeping you out of trouble till I find out what it is.”

 

 

 

She was dozing uneasily a few hours later when JARVIS woke her. 

“Agent Romanov, you requested notification of…”

“Yeah…” she muttered, sitting up in bed. “What’s going on?”

“Thor has come down from the roof and is attempting to convince Captain Rogers to let him talk to his brother.”

“Fuck… what’s Steve doing?”

“Captain Rogers has informed him that such a confrontation was unnecessary and could at least wait until after Loki’s meeting with Director Fury tomorrow.”

She slumped back against her pillows. “Good. Did Thor listen?”

“He appears to be returning to his own room without argument, ma’am.”

“Awesome. Steve’s getting better at this.”

“I agree, ma’am.”

“I didn’t know you had opinions.”

“My opinion in this situation is based on assessment of Captain Rogers’ vocal tone, word choice, and body language. He has improved in measures of assertiveness and…”

“Okay… how about you tell me in the morning?”

“Yes, ma’am. Sleep well.”

“What did Loki say about Thor coming in?”

“Loki has been asleep since he returned to the guest room and Captain Rogers did not allow Thor to wake him.”

“So much for your analysis of Asgardian sleep patterns.”

“I only had one Asgardian to study until now, Agent Romanov. In addition to the inevitable flaws in this method, it appears that Loki is in somewhat poor overall condition, while Thor is quite healthy and…”

“Yeah. Okay. I get it. Goodnight.”

 

 

 

Steve glanced over at the bed; his hearing was good enough to pick up shifts in breathing patterns, and if JARVIS’s quiet announcement of Thor’s arrival and Steve’s discussion with him in the hall had woken Loki, he was better at hiding it than anyone Steve had ever met. 

“Are you awake?” he asked, settling back into his chair. 

“Yes, Captain. I heard the voice in the wall say something about my brother,” Loki said, without moving or rolling over to face him. 

“You could have said something if you wanted to talk to him.”

“He has nothing to say to me at the moment, except to express his displeasure about my presence here and his concern that I intend to harm you all.”

“Guess you’ll have to prove him wrong,” Steve said. 

“No matter what I tell anyone, no one will ever be certain it’s not a lie.”

“Have you lied to me since Clint brought you back here?”

Loki glanced over his shoulder. “Actually, no, now that I think about it. But Clint has.”

“Yeah. I think Natasha knows something about that, but she’s not going to tell me.”

“It doesn’t bother you that you’re supposed to be the leader of this team and yet she keeps secrets from you, even when they might put the team at risk?”

“No. Because I trust her,” Steve said. “I trust all of them. And not because they’ve never screwed up, and not that I’ll never end up regretting it… but they’re good people and they want to do the right thing. Even if they can’t agree on what it is. Natasha was trained to keep secrets. It’s what she does. And she’s protecting Clint because she loves him.”

“And not you.”

Steve shrugged. “She told me at the beginning it wasn’t ever going to be about love.”

“I thought that was the American way, Captain. Falling in love with a nice girl and getting married and having babies and living the American dream…”

“It’s not that simple anymore. Honestly, I don’t think it was even that simple back then. We just pretended it was.”

“I see,” Loki murmured, laying his head back down. “You’re very candid, Captain. I expected you to be much more reserved.”

“I don’t usually say much. But nobody usually asks me much.”

“Why not?”

“Because Tony and Bruce have each other, and Clint and Natasha have each other, and Clint and Thor have each other, and… you know.”

“And you don’t.”

“Go back to sleep. We’re getting up early in the morning so we can stop somewhere and get you some clothes that fit before we go meet with Fury.”

“Very well, Captain. Thank you for your openness.”

“My name is Steve. And I guess I figure if you decide to go and share everything I’ve told you with the entire world, it wouldn’t really matter anyway. Everyone knows I’m not some kind of magical incarnation of the American Dream… I’m just a guy that was used as a test subject and ended up being… you know. Me. But compared to the Hulk and Tony blasting around in his suit and nuclear bombs and aliens and… I’m not really that big a deal anymore.”

“You don’t seem terribly bothered by that.”

“It’s kind of nice. I kind of like it. Being… a little closer to ordinary.”

Loki chuckled. “I don’t think any member of this team is ordinary.”

“No… probably not. But go back to sleep. I’m going to nap here in my chair. Wake me up if you need anything.”

“I will… Steve.”

 

 

 

Natasha was awake to see Steve and Loki off; so was Clint, but he lurked in the kitchen and watched from behind the counter as Natasha reviewed Fury’s instructions. 

“There will be a guy at the store waiting for you. Just say Tony Stark sent you and he’ll get Loki some clothes and charge it to Tony’s account. Don’t spend too long there. Fury doesn’t want you staying in one location too long when you’re outside the tower.”

“Is he worried about something happening?” Steve asked. “If he is, he could have Bruce or Tony or you come with us.”

“Or me,” Clint said. 

Natasha glanced over her shoulder at him before turning back to Steve and Loki. “I don’t know what he’s worried about, but I know he wants to keep this low-key, and nothing about Tony in his suit with lasers blasting out of it is low-key. And Fury’s not going to put Bruce in a situation where…”

“Where I might trigger his transformation,” Loki finished the sentence for her. 

“It’s just not a risk he’s going to take,” she said. “And you know why he’s not sending Clint. And he’s not sending me because I’m watching Clint, who’s playing some kind of game and thinks he’s going to keep it a secret from me and is going to fail like he always does because I’m smarter than him.”

Clint scowled and pretended to be more interested in his cereal than the proceedings. 

“Keep your eyes open,” she said. “Fury seems to think this needs to stay under wraps, and that means someone wants to know about it who shouldn’t. I don’t know if that’s just his usual paranoia or something else, but…”

“We’ll be careful,” Steve said. “He’s probably just being paranoid anyway.”

Clint muttered something about paranoia and Natasha. She ignored him. 

“Driver’s waiting downstairs. Use the doors at the bottom of the back stairwell. Call the tower if anything happens and JARVIS will send out the alarm.”

“Will do.”

 

 

 

The salesman at the store was more than happy to assist Loki in finding suitable clothing, especially with Tony Stark’s open account waiting to be charged. Steve wasn’t sure how much they were supposed to get, but he didn’t think Tony cared, so he let the man stock Loki up with several outfits, some casual and some formal, before he insisted on leaving. Loki chose a pair of plain black pants, a gray sweater, and black boots to replace the ill-fitting assortment he’d been wearing, and Steve was surprised to find himself mildly annoyed that he could manage to look so effortlessly graceful. The perks of being a demigod, maybe. The annoyance was immediately replaced by the thought that he’d like to draw him right now, because with his lean figure and pale skin and the grays and blacks he was a great contrast study, but he didn’t have his sketch pad and he wasn’t going to start randomly sketching the person he was guarding. The rest of the team didn’t seem to object, although Tony seemed to find it hilarious and would insist on striking ridiculous poses when he caught Steve at it. Natasha had even let him draw her while she was sleeping, once, but had insisted he hide the picture. Thor seemed to take it in stride and had informed him that Asgardians often had their likeness painted by great artists and that he approved of Captain Steve continuing the tradition. 

He managed to force the salesman to stop trying to add extra items to the stack beside the register, and finally they walked out of the store, both of them carrying bags to the waiting car. If the driver was impatient, he gave no indication of it, but if he was used to driving Tony Stark around, he was probably used to just about everything. Steve had been a bit surprised when he and Loki first sat down that there was a black glass barrier between them and the driver, with a button if they wanted to speak to him and another button if they wanted to lower the glass.   
“I’m sure you can imagine what Tony Stark might do in the back of a vehicle that would require privacy,” Loki said, as they climbed back into the car with the bags. 

“I’d rather not. Besides, I don’t think Bruce would…”

“There was a before Bruce, was there not?”

“Yeah. But I’d rather not think about that either.”

“I’m surprised that a man like Tony Stark would seem so content with a quiet man like Dr. Banner… especially when his primary interest in the past seems to have been women, and many of them.”

Steve shrugged. “People change, I guess. I mean… it seems like now, it’s okay… maybe not okay with everybody, but okay with a lot of people, for guys to like guys, or girls to like girls, or for people to like both, or everything… it’s kind of confusing.”

“Only when one involves unnecessary morality issues,” Loki said. “There are no such issues among Asgardians.”

“You just… whoever?”

“No. When you wed, commit yourself to another, it is expected that you will be faithful to them, although that isn’t always the case and it is expected that situations may arise... and obviously, if one wishes to produce offspring, choosing a partner of the opposite gender is handy, although not entirely necessary, as exceptions have occurred. But there is no inherent concern with whether one’s partner is male or female at any particular time.”

“So it’s just… whoever you happen to like?”

“We are drawn to people. Not to genders. It’s why Thor has no issue happily sharing his bed with Clint… or sharing Clint with his friends. He has pursued… and succeeded in winning over… many women. And many men.”

“What about you?”

Loki smiled and shrugged his shoulders. “If I wanted my brother’s rejected suitors, I suppose I could have had them. But knowing I was always their last choice made it somehow… unappealing. I have some dignity, after all.”

“Why would you always be their last choice?” Steve asked, puzzled. “Or is everyone in Asgard a fan of big muscles and blond hair?”

“Everyone in Asgard is a fan of future kingship,” Loki said. “And Thor is the heir to the throne. It has long been known that I had earned Odin’s displeasure, and that meant that I would never have a place of honor in the royal court despite my supposed birthright. There were many others more in Odin’s favor, and in Thor’s, who had brighter futures.”

“Is that all people there think about?” Steve asked, rolling his eyes. 

“Are people here any different?” Loki asked. 

Steve glanced out the window for a moment. “Not really. I mean, yes, but… some of them are like that. A lot of them are probably like that.”

“How many women wanted you before you were Captain America?”

“How many do you think?” Steve said, grinning wryly. 

“Since we have been honest with each other, Captain, how many times have you been in love?”

“Once,” Steve said. 

“Who was she?”

“A girl from back before… everything. She knew me before the serum. She was nice to me.”

“And that was the only time?”

“Yeah.”

Loki smiled. “You know, there’s one thing a liar is good for, and that’s spotting another liar. Especially a bad one, which you are. That’s the first lie you’ve told me.”

Steve frowned. “I don’t…”

“You don’t have to tell me,” Loki said. “You are more than welcome to keep your secrets.”

Steve looked at him. “First, you tell me.”

“About what?”

“About being in love.”

“Once,” Loki said, quietly. “And that is the truth. And it was made very clear that I would not be loved in return. I will not make the same mistake again.”

Steve nodded slowly, hesitating before he spoke. “You’re right. I lied. There was someone else. Before Peggy, even. He…”

He glanced at Loki, expecting some shock or horror, but Loki just raised his eyebrows as if waiting for the rest of the sentence. 

“He was a friend of mine from when we were kids. His name was Bucky. We fought together, after I’d had the serum. Before that, the army wouldn’t even take me. I don’t think he liked me being Captain America, though. Before, he was always trying to get girls to go out with me. Afterwards, all the girls wanted to chase Captain America.”

“Was he a bit jealous, perhaps?”

“No… no… I’m sure he didn’t… I mean, he would never have… not like that. He wasn’t that kind of guy. He was…”

“Are you ashamed to have been ‘that kind of guy’, Captain?”

“I told you. My name is Steve. And yeah, I am, but I guess I’m not supposed to be. Or I am. I don’t know. It’s okay for other people but it’s not okay for me. I don’t care if it makes Tony and Bruce happy… that’s good. Or Clint and Thor. If they’re happy. That’s good. But it’s not okay for me.”

“Because you’re Captain America?”

“I’m supposed to be… good. Right.”

“Had you ever admitted to anyone before that you had been in love with another man?”

“No. And if you’re going to go and tell everyone…”

“Why would I do that? I have nothing to gain from shaming you. I doubt your teammates would be shocked, and the rest of the world would think me a ridiculous liar trying to smear your honorable reputation.”

“I don’t deserve it. Not after thinking about things like that.”

“Why not?”

“It’s wrong. I mean… it used to be. I guess it’s not anymore, but some people still think it is…”

“I thought Captain America stood for the rights of people to make their own choices and find happiness in their own way.”

Steve glanced at him. “I guess he does.”

He jumped when fingers brushed across his hand, and although he didn’t dare to look down, he couldn’t pull his hand away, either. They sat for a long moment, Loki’s fingers resting against his skin while he grinned at Steve’s wide-eyed stare. 

In the next moment, they were thrown forward as an impact rocked the car, and then another one from the side that flung them both against the passenger’s side of the car with bags of clothes and broken glass tumbling down on them. Steve groped for the shield that had been next to his feet, but he couldn’t find it in the sideways chaos that the car had turned into, and there were voices shouting outside.

“Are you okay?” he demanded. 

Loki squirmed out from under him. “I seem to be. Is this your shield?”

Steve gripped it and took a deep breath. 

“On the count of three, we’re both going to kick out this roof at the same time, and when it breaks, we’re going to run,” Steve said, leaning back to get his feet against the roof of the car, which was now in front of him. “Stay with me. Don’t stop for anyone. I don’t know what this is but it may be a fight we can’t win.”

Loki nodded. 

“Ready? One… two…”

 

 

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	32. Chapter 32

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The team who finds out who rudely interrupted Steve and Loki's excursion. Natasha knows EVERYBODY, and she doesn't like when people keep secrets from her. Especially the possibly-get-people-killed kind of secrets. The Avengers should possibly change their name to Team Smartass. 
> 
> .  
> .  
> .

Clint barely managed to set down the bow he was working on before Natasha dragged him away from his locker by the back of his shirt and spun him around to slam him against the wall. 

“Ow! Hey!”

“Shut up, Clint. I’m not playing.”

“What the fuck…”

“The car carrying Steve and Loki was attacked three minutes ago. Tony and Thor are on their way. And you’re going to start talking, and you KNOW I know how to make you talk.”

“I don’t…”

“No. Team members are in danger. We’re done fucking around. Start talking or I’ll start hurting you, Clint, and I’m not joking, and you know I wouldn’t be doing this if I had a choice, but this has gone far enough. You brought Loki here and you know something about him that you’re not telling us and now Steve could be dead and you’re going to fucking tell me why.”

Clint looked away. “I didn’t think it would…”

She shoved him down onto the bench and stood with arms crossed, staring down at him, and he realized he hadn’t seen that look on her face since the last time she really HAD been trying to kill him. 

“Talk, Clint. And talk fast.”

“I have to show you something.”

“If this is a way to get out of…”

“No. It’s in the lab.”

They arrived at the doors to the lab with Natasha’s hand firmly locked onto the collar of Clint’s shirt. He looked at her expectantly. 

“What?”

“You gonna open the doors?”

“How have you been getting in?”

“Through the ductwork.”

“Damnit, Clint...”

She keyed in the code to open the lab doors. 

“If you’ve been working on something in here, JARVIS has to have been helping you.”

“He has. But he didn’t know it was anything that needed to be reported.”

He reached under one of the tables, pulled out a small box, and dumped its contents out for Natasha to see. It didn’t look like much: two halves of a metal sphere about the size of a marble, a few bits and pieces of micro-electronics, what might have been a very tiny power source, and a needle so thin she could hardly see it. 

“What is it?”

“When I went out looking for Loki… when we left Earth and then I brought him back here… I went to the park first. This was under the bench. I only noticed it because it was trying to fly away… those are tiny little jets like on Tony’s suit… but it was out of power. I brought it down here and took it apart and asked JARVIS to help me figure out what it was.”

“JARVIS?” Natasha asked. 

“Agent Romanov, the item in question appears to be made of materials not known to be manufactured on Earth. The electronics are far more complex than even the nanotechnology currently in development here. I cannot decode the programming, but I was able to amplify remnants of a signal that it had been receiving, which appears to originate from a location off-planet, possibly a mobile location such as a ship.”

“So it was following Loki?”

“I believe it was intended to track down Loki,” JARVIS explained. “The needle appears to have been designed to inject some nearly microscopic item under the skin, and from analysis of the needle itself, it has numerous skin cells on its exterior, indicating that it has already served its purpose.”

“It’s not a tracking device,” Clint said. “Someone sent it here to find him, and then it injected a tracking device.”

Natasha glared at him. “You knew.”

“I didn’t know exactly what it was. S.H.I.E.L.D. intercepted one once, before you came over. I’d seen it before, but they didn’t…”

“Who uses them?”

JARVIS answered. “According to S.H.I.E.L.D. records of the three of these devices intercepted since the 1960’s, it is suspected that they inject a tag that transmits not only the location of the individual, but also an indication to others that the pursuers are actively engaged with this target and it is not to be claimed by anyone else.”

“So… bounty hunters.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She glared at Clint. “You knew that bounty hunters had found Loki and staked a claim on him and you didn’t fucking tell us?”

“You guys had enough reasons to throw him out anyway…”

“And that’s going to be good enough if Steve and Tony and Thor end up dead?”

“I didn’t realize they were going to come for him so soon. I thought he’d meet with Fury and once Fury made his call, I’d tell him about it.”

“JARVIS, any word from Tony?”

“Mr. Stark indicates that they have arrived at the location. It appears Captain Rogers and Loki escaped the vehicle and fled, with unknown attackers in pursuit. Mr. Stark and Thor are attempting to locate them.”

“Keep me informed.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Clint frowned. “I should be out there helping…”

She shot him a vicious look. “It’s your fault they’re in danger. And this time, it was totally your choice. No mind control, no seizures… you were stupid and you thought you’d go behind the team’s back with your little plans and this is what happened. You are not going out to help. I’m notifying Fury of the situation and I’m recommending that you be removed from all duties until somebody can knock some sense into you because I fucking give up.”

She stormed out of the lab, leaving Clint standing in silence, looking at the little pile of parts. 

“JARVIS?”

“Yes, Agent Barton?”

“How did I fuck this up so bad?”

“I don’t know, sir. You are uniquely talented.”

 

 

 

 

“… three.”

The roof of the car crumpled under the impact the kicks. Steve tucked his shield over his head and rolled out into a crouch on the glass-scattered pavement. He could hear screaming, but the screams seemed to be heading away from them. The sound that struck his ears was a loud hissing that rose and faded. He moved the shield and looked up to find himself staring at a massive, vaguely gorilla-shaped creature with hairless orange skin, various scraps of metal strapped to itself for armor, and large flaps on the sides of its neck that opened and closed with each breath. 

He realized the thing wasn’t looking at him. It was looking at Loki, crouched beside him. 

“Do you know what that is?” he asked.

“Nothing good,” Loki murmured. 

The thing lifted what was very clearly some sort of weapon, and it made an unpleasant high-pitched screech as it was activated. 

Steve gave Loki a quick nod to make sure he was on board, and then bounced to his feet and bolted for the nearest building with Loki on his heels. From behind them he heard the buzzing crackle of an energy weapon being fired, but kept running. They had nearly reached the building when he realized that the glass panels were packed with staring onlookers. 

“We can’t take that thing in there…”

Loki nodded toward the nearby alley. It didn’t look promising but it was better than nothing. 

They had made it some distance down the alley, and Steve was about to look over his shoulder and see why the orange gorilla alien with the energy weapon wasn’t behind them anymore, when a sudden flare of light in front of them brought them to a skidding halt. 

The flare turned out to be repulsor jets on a gray suit that vaguely resembled Tony’s, except that Steve wasn’t entirely sure there was anyone alive inside it; the torso was wasp-thin and the legs barely more than metal struts. After a moment, though, the thing flipped up its visor, revealing an almost-human face. 

“That’s far enough,” it said. 

“What do you want?” Steve demanded. 

It grinned. “He knows.”

Steve looked over at Loki, who shook his head wearily. “They’re bounty hunters. They’ve come to collect. You must be rather desperate, if you’re willing to come all the way to Earth for the pittance Thanos is offering…”

“Oh, you didn’t hear?” the creature smirked. “Thanos has tripled the bounty on all Asgardians. Including you. Besides, we tagged you days ago.”

Loki scowled and rubbed the back of his neck. “I thought it was a bee sting.”

“Well, Thanos would rather have you alive but he’s going to kill you himself anyway, so he doesn’t really object to you being dead. So are you coming willingly, or should I just kill you now?”

“Let him go,” Loki said, nodding toward Steve as the orange alien lumbered up behind them; apparently it let its smaller, faster partner do the chasing. 

“Who is he? There might be a bounty on him,” it muttered. 

“He’s no one,” Loki said. “Just a human I met. Thanos will come here and kill as many humans as he pleases eventually. He doesn’t need one now.”

The suit-wearing creature had flipped down its visor, and after a moment, it began to laugh. 

“Oh, no. We knew to expect nothing but lies from you.”

It raised the visor and grinned at its companion. 

“This is Captain America. An Avenger. Thanos has a bounty out on the entire team.”

None of them were expecting the next voice to come from above their heads. 

“How much is the bounty, out of curiosity? Because I’m pretty rich.”

Steve tried not to smile as Tony landed beside him. 

“Not rich enough,” the orange creature growled. “And he doesn’t even care if we bring you idiots in alive.”

“How much for a prince of Asgard?” Thor demanded, hitting the ground behind the suited alien with the force of a piano being dropped from the roof. 

“An excellent price, for you,” it said, turning around and raising its hands. “But perhaps now isn’t the time to try to claim it.”

Its orange companion scowled. “You’re an idiot. I told you there was a reason no one else had tried to claim these yet.”

“Ummm… you tried to kill our friends,” Tony reminded them. “That means we have to do something about you. Wonder if there are bounties on bounty hunters?”

“I know who’d LOVE to have them,” Steve said. “Might even make up for Loki being late for his meeting.”

Thor grinned. “I’m sure Fury will appreciate the gift.”

“Drop your weapon,” Tony said, raising his suited hand with its bristling variety of projectiles in the direction of the orange creature. “And I’d tell you to unsuit, but…”

“Can’t,” it muttered. “Mostly cybernetic.”

“Well, power it all down, because if you try anything creative, Thor’s going to put his hammer through the part of you that isn’t.”

While Thor and Steve set about attempting to secure their enemies’ hands and other weapons, Tony lowered his helmet. 

“Hey, JARVIS. How are things back at the ranch?”

“Agent Romanov is extremely displeased, sir. It seems that Agent Barton possessed evidence that Loki had been marked by bounty hunters and was likely to be attacked, and he kept this information from the rest of the team. She stated that she intends to have Director Fury pull him from active duty, but she has not yet contacted him. I believe she is waiting to consult with the rest of the team, assuming that you all return unharmed, as I assume you are.”

“All present and accounted for. But I need Natasha to get on the line with S.H.I.E.L.D. and send someone to our current location with a Quinjet and some containment equipment. We’ve got some interesting guests for S.H.I.E.L.D. to mess around with.”

“I will inform her immediately.”

“How did Clint know… never mind. What’s he doing?”

“He is in his room. He expressed significant concern that his actions may have put the other members of the team at risk and I believe he is waiting to hear whether you have escaped harm.”

“Tell him we’re all okay,” Tony said. “And then tell him to stay where he is. And that we’ll handle it once we get these guys packaged and shipped. And not to do anything stupid. We can fix this.”

“Sir, if Agent Romanov reports…”

“She’s not going to. If she was, she’d have done it already. She doesn’t know what to do with him, and I don’t really know either, but I know he wasn’t doing it to try to get us killed.”

“I do not believe so, sir. It seems he was concerned that the team would refuse to allow Loki to remain in the tower if they knew he was being actively hunted…”

“You’d think he’d know us better by know,” Tony muttered. 

“Human judgment is highly flawed under any circumstances,” JARVIS observed. “Of course, being under extreme stress for an extended period of time, such as…”

“Yeah, yeah. I get it.”

“Very well, sir. Agent Romanov says that there should be a Quinjet on the way, and that she will be arriving shortly.”

 

 

 

 

When Natasha arrived, the Quinjet had just cleared a landing space on the street. Tony, Steve, and Thor were marching the two bounty hunters out of the alley, with Loki trailing behind. 

“Are you serious?” she asked, approaching the cybernetic-suited alien as one of the S.H.I.E.L.D. agents took it from Tony. 

The creature grinned. “You again. I thought you worked for the other side.”

“Things change. What happened to your body?”

“Nothing good,” it said, chuckling. “I told that lumbering oaf back there that we shouldn’t have bothered with this bounty…”

“You told me? I’m the one who told you, you walking trash pile…”

“Easy,” one of the agents said, steering them into the Quinjet. 

They watched as it lifted off. A lot of bystanders were watching too, but since nothing had really been damaged besides Tony’s car, they were more curious than terrified. 

“You really do know just about everybody, don’t you,” Tony said.

Natasha smiled slightly. “The Russians had some contact with aliens during the time I was with them. That one used to be human. Jumped planet somehow. Not the only one.”

“Why don’t I know any aliens?” Tony demanded. 

Natasha pointed at Loki and Thor. 

“They don’t look like aliens,” Tony sulked. “Loki looks like a grown-up Goth kid and Thor looks like an underwear model.”

Thor grinned and flexed his muscles. Steve rolled his eyes. 

“Don’t we have things we need to do?”

“Fury wants us back to the tower,” Natasha said. “He doesn’t want Loki out in public till we can find and remove the tag they planted.”

“We should be able to do that,” Tony said. “It might be tiny, but if it’s broadcasting a signal, any kind of signal, JARVIS can pin it down.”

“The device used to implant it only had a needle long enough to put it just under the skin,” Natasha said. 

“That’s the device that Clint had and didn’t tell anyone about?” Tony asked. 

“Yeah.”

“About that…”

“I’ll handle it.”

“We’ll handle it,” Steve said. 

“He put you directly in danger.”

“He didn’t know these bounty hunters were going to show up today,” Steve argued. “And if Fury asks me to call it, my call’s going to be that Clint made a bad decision affected by major physical and mental stress and that the team is going to handle it.”

Natasha turned away, and anyone who didn’t know her would have thought the expression on her face was one of anger, but her team, even Tony, knew her better than that by now, and could see the relief behind the scowl. She trusted her team. If Steve was going to take the decision off her shoulders, she wasn’t going to argue. 

“I would ask for forgiveness on Agent Barton’s behalf,” Loki murmured. “I warned him that chaos and suffering follow me wherever I go…”

“You didn’t even know Barton had the stupid thing,” Natasha said. “Come on… let’s get you back to the tower before any more random aliens show up wanting to collect you. I brought one of the SUV’s. It’s got room for everybody if Tony unsuits.”

“Nah. Rather fly. Beat you all there. Later, suckers…”

He launched into the air, making the gathered crowd chatter excitedly. 

“Asshole. Has to make an exit,” Natasha muttered, smiling. “Anyone else have a problem with going by car? Good. Let’s move.”

 

 

 

 

“Agent Barton does not wish to be disturbed,” JARVIS said, in response to Bruce’s knock.

“I’m overriding his wish to not be disturbed,” Bruce said. 

“You don’t have the authority to do that, sir.”

“Damn. It was worth a try. What if I tell you that I need to make a health check on Agent Barton because he’s under high stress and not responding to communications?”

There was a pause for a moment, and then JARVIS replied. 

“Agent Barton says that if you are going to stand out here and attempt to convince me to grant you access, he might as well just let you in.”

The door slid open. 

Bruce stepped in and found Clint stretched out on his bed, facing the wall, shoulders tight. He gave no indication that someone had even come in. 

“They’re all fine, Clint.”

“That’s what JARVIS said.”

“No. Seriously. I just talked to Natasha. They’re all in the SUV, except Tony, who apparently decided he was going to escort the Quinjet just for fun…”

“He’s racing it,” Clint muttered. “He told me after the Loki battle that he wanted to race one of them because they were slow.”

“Sounds about right,” Bruce said. “But they’re fine. They’re laughing. Apparently one of the bounty hunters couldn’t even manage to chase them because it was some kind of gorilla with gills or something, and the other one didn’t have a body but it turned out Natasha knew whatever it does still have and they had a quick chat before they got loaded into the Quinjet. S.H.I.E.L.D. is pleased as hell to have aliens to play with and Fury already called Steve to tell him that it looked pretty damn good for the team that all those midtown witnesses got to see the Avengers handle things nice and professional, no lasers blasting, no explosions… just rounding up the bad guys and carting them off.”

“The fact that it turned out okay doesn’t mean I didn’t put them at risk of getting killed.”

Bruce sighed and sat down on the bed. 

“You’re right. But I did too.”

Clint glanced over his shoulder at him. “What?”

“I knew about your toy. I found it last night working in the lab. Was looking for a box to put spare parts in and found that one. JARVIS told me what it was… don’t get all pissed off; you told him he wasn’t allowed to tell anyone that it was there. You didn’t tell him not to disclose what it was if someone happened to find it.”

“Fucking computers.”

“So I knew. And I didn’t tell them either.”

Clint flopped back down. “You should have.”

“You wanted to keep it a secret for a reason. I wasn’t going to…”

“Just till he’d met with Fury,” Clint said. “Just till he got permission to stay. Then…”

“You so sure Fury’s going to give him permission to stay?”

Clint shrugged. “If he doesn’t, he’s going to have to start running again.”

“Natasha says they think the tag is under the skin on the back of his neck. Tony and I should be able to put a little electrode in there and fry its circuitry. And the bounty on his head is apparently less than the one on Thor’s, but nobody’s throwing Thor out because we’re afraid… you’re not even listening, are you?”

Clint shrugged again. Bruce kicked off his shoes and stretched out next to him, waiting to see if Clint rolled away. When he didn’t, Bruce draped an arm over him carefully and, after a moment, pulled him closer. He felt some of the rigid near-panic begin to drain out of Clint’s muscles, and eventually Clint’s fingers reached up to interlace with his. Bruce pressed his face into the back of Clint’s neck. 

“We’re not letting you go anywhere. Not even if you make mistakes.”

“I don’t…”

“Nope… no talking. Not about that. Or I’ll gag you.”

Clint laughed and pressed himself back against the warmth of Bruce’s solid body. 

“If you gag me I can’t bitch and complain, and that’s half the point.”

Bruce let his hand wander over the flat tightness of Clint’s stomach. “Fun for you.”

“Why is Thor okay with you doing this and not Loki?”

“Umm… because he thinks Loki’s going to kill you?” Bruce said, sliding his hand down to brush his fingers over Clint’s cock where it was hardening inside his jeans. “Which he might, you know.”

“He had his chance,” Clint said, words broken by a gasp as Bruce’s palm cupped him and rubbed gently. “Fuck… that would be better without clothes on.”

“Always in such a hurry. I just got here and you already want to get naked.”

Clint rolled his eyes. “You don’t want to get naked?”

“I want to take my time,” Bruce said, still stroking him slowly. “You need to unwind. That’s not going to happen fast. We’re going to take our time and I’m going to make sure you’re down far enough to let it all go, and I’m going to take care of you, and then it’s going to be okay, and everyone will be back here and settled down and probably watching TV like nothing ever happened.”

Clint’s eyes had drifted closed as Bruce spoke, but now they slid halfway open for a moment. 

“There are handcuffs in the nightstand.”

“We’ll get there,” Bruce murmured, letting his free hand find the back of Clint’s neck and start rubbing into the knotted tension lurking there. “I’m not restraining you until I’m sure you’re not still in panic mode.”

Clint muttered something, but it wasn’t anything important, because he didn’t bother to actually include any words. 

“I’ve got all day,” Bruce said, his mouth against Clint’s ear. “Nice and slow. But you have to relax. You have to let go. Okay?”

Clint nodded, but his fingers were tugging at the edges of Bruce’s shirt. 

“You know, it’s really hard to take it easy with you when you have this thing where you make people want to grab you and fuck you through a wall.”

Clint grinned. “The Other Guy could do that.”

“He could, but you wouldn’t survive it, and then he’d feel really bad afterwards, because he likes you and he wouldn’t understand why I let him break you.”

Clint opened his eyes again. “What’s he think of Loki? I mean, now?”

Bruce considered for a moment. “He doesn’t seem to see him as a threat the way he did before. Maybe because you guys aren’t responding to him as a threat… well, except Thor. Maybe because he’s not acting like a threat. The Other Guy is pretty smart about certain things.”

“Like what?”

“He likes Tony a lot but he thinks he’s an idiot. And he really, really likes you, but he worries about you a lot and he gets stirred up if there’s any hint of you being in trouble.”

“But I brought Loki back here, and he knows Loki is the one who did all those things to me, and he’s not triggered?”

“I don’t think he thinks that’s the same person,” Bruce said. 

“I’m not sure it is either.”

“Didn’t I tell you that you were going to stop talking and let me do things to you?”

“Oh. Right.”

 

 

 

 

Natasha kept her eyes focused on the road and the busy midday traffic as she drove, but some part of her was still aware of whatever Thor was doing in the seat beside her. Fortunately, he seemed to be much calmer than the day before, leaning back to talk to joke with Steve about whether the bounty should be higher on a captain or a prince.

“Seems like a royal family could be expected to pay a pretty good ransom for a prince,” Steve said. 

“True,” Thor agreed. “But since it seems that Thanos intends to kill all of us, perhaps ransom value should not be considered in the calculations.”

“Valid point,” Steve said. 

“Okay…” Natasha broke in. “But then why were these idiots on Earth hunting Loki, if there’s a bigger bounty on Thor? I mean, Thor’s dangerous, but we know Loki can put up a hell of a fight too.”

“Because he was alone,” Thor said, glancing back at his brother. “Bounty hunters generally work alone, in pairs. Not in groups. They are not prepared to take on the entire team. They had heard word from Asgard of Loki’s banishment. They knew he would be alone. One cannot survive alone forever, no matter how strong one might be… there is always a time when you must rest, must have peace, and that is when your enemies will come for you. That is when you need others at your back.”

“Yeah. It is,” Natasha said. “JARVIS?”

“Yes, Agent Romanov?”

“Where’s Clint?”

“Agent Barton is still in his room, ma’am.”

“Okay… at least he didn’t leave. That’s a good sign.”

“Dr. Banner is with him, ma’am, and it appears that he has the situation well under control.”

Natasha smirked. “I’ll bet he does.”

“Poor Bruce, having to manage this situation alone!” Thor exclaimed, placing his hand over his heart in mock sympathy. 

“I’m surprised Tony hasn’t joined in yet.”

“Ma’am, I believe that Mr. Stark is aware that perhaps this is a situation where his particular style of management would not be of great benefit.”

“Is it possible that any situation would not be improved by Tony Stark’s stunning cleverness and dazzling personality?” Loki asked. 

Natasha glanced at him and grinned. “I’d say flattery will get you nowhere, but with Tony, it usually will.”

“It seems a bit unnecessary, considering that the amount of time he spends flattering himself leaves little room for others to do so,” Thor chuckled. 

“It’s not really fair to pick on Tony behind his back,” Steve said. 

“You’re right,” Natasha agreed. “JARVIS, contact Mr. Stark and tell him we’re making fun of him because he and his special suit were too awesome to ride in the car with us and he’s missing it.”

“I will notify him immediately, ma’am.”

 

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	33. Chapter 33

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As team members try to orient themselves to Loki's presence and Loki tries to orient himself to living in the tower, Natasha plays mastermind and matchmaker because... well, is there really anyone around there competent for both jobs?
> 
> .  
> .  
> .

Bruce yawned and rolled over as Clint pulled away from him and slid to the edge of the bed.

“Where are you going?”

“Get some fresh air.”

“Rest of the team back?”

Clint nodded. “Don’t worry. I’m not going to cause trouble. I’m just going up to the roof for a little while.”

Bruce raised an eyebrow. “Last time you went up on the roof…”

“Yeah, but this time Loki’s in the living room with Thor, arguing with Tony about the quantum mechanics of the Bifrost… which Tony is probably wrong about, since physics is really more your game… and this time the Other Guy wouldn’t be fooled that easily anyway.”

“Loki and Thor are in the same room and behaving?”

“According to JARVIS,” Clint said. “Natasha probably threatened to do violent, painful things to them if they didn’t.”

“You want me to come up with you?”

“No thanks. I promise. I won’t be up there long. Just… want to be up high and out in the air for a few minutes.”

Bruce tried to stifle another yawn. “JARVIS will tell us if it looks like you’re doing anything weird.”

“Dr. Banner,” JARVIS said, “I must clarify this statement, as I do not have set parameters for what does and does not qualify as ‘weird’.”

Bruce sighed. “If anything’s happening that looks like it shouldn’t be happening, tell me.”

“Yes, sir.”

Clint grinned as he pulled his shirt over his head. “This place is so fucked up the computer can’t even define a set of parameters for what passes as ‘not normal’.”

“I beg your pardon, Agent Barton, but if you refer to ‘the computer’ others may be confused as to whether you are discussing me or any lesser computer that happens to be in the vicinity.”

Clint glanced up at the speaker. “Did I just hurt your feelings, JARVIS?”

“I do not have feelings, sir.”

“Yeah. Whatever.”

He leaned over and rubbed Bruce’s disheveled hair before heading for the door.

 

 

 

 

 

Steve set down the book he’d been pretending to read and glanced up at Natasha as she settled herself cross-legged at the foot of his bed.

“We don’t need to talk about anything. I mean, unless you mean about Loki. I mean, what to do with him. What the team’s going to do with him. You know. Team things. That’s…”

“Are you done now?” she asked, trying not to smile.

“Yeah,” he said, lowering his eyes. “Let me guess. You were listening to me and Loki in the car this morning.”

“I’m team security, Steve. You were transporting a possibly dangerous known war criminal. I assumed you knew I was listening.”

“I guess I did. I just… forgot. I know that’s stupid. I know nowadays there are bugs in everything and someone is always listening and…”

She waved her hand. “It was just me, Steve. You know that commercial that says ‘what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas’?”

“Yeah. I see it on TV.”

“What the teams knows stays with the team. And what I know and don’t think the rest of the team needs to know just stays with me.”

He nodded uncertainly. “So what do we need to talk about? I mean, am I in trouble? I know what I said… if that’s not… I know I’m Captain America and I can’t…”

She rolled her eyes. “Steve, the world doesn’t need to know what you do behind closed doors. And there isn’t anything wrong with being attracted to men and to women. Honestly, I don’t think the vast majority of people are a hundred percent straight. Even people who would normally never even look at someone of the same gender in a sexual way can end up thinking differently under the right circumstances… or if they meet the right people. But I don’t think it’s just sexual attraction for you, is it? I think you need something more than just physical attraction to be attracted to someone.”

Steve looked up at her. “You’re physically attractive.”

“And so are you. But I know perfectly well that this hasn’t been about love for you. It wasn’t supposed to be. Just about learning. So I taught you.”

He smiled wryly. “You did a good job… at least I think so.”

“I know what I’m doing,” she said. “And I think now you have a pretty good idea. But when you said you’d been in love twice… they were both people you had a strong bond with. People you felt deeply connected to. For some people, that’s the basis of attraction. Some people can’t be sexually drawn to someone unless they feel like there’s a real emotional connection first. And I can kind of see that being you.”

“Yeah,” Steve said. “So can I. I mean… not that I don’t feel any connection with you…”

“We have a connection,” she said, patting his knee. “We’re friends. That’s fine. And some people, like Clint or Tony… they can feel sexual attraction toward someone they have no connection with at all. It’s just how different people work.”

Steve managed to force himself to look her in the face. “So… what about… you know.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know what Loki’s game is. I don’t know if he’s really attracted to you, or if it’s just that no one’s been nice to him in a long time… I mean, I don’t know what went on with him and Clint but ‘nice’ isn’t usually part of how Clint operates when it comes to things like that… I don’t know if he’s just trying to win you over so you’ll be on his side if things go sour. I don’t know if he thinks he can compromise you and use you against us somehow. I have no idea what’s going on in his head… but I don’t think he does either.”  
Steve shook his head. “I think he’s… sort of lost. This isn’t his world. He can’t go back to Asgard. He’s stuck here, and…”

  
“And you can relate.”

  
“Yeah. I can.”

  
“I wish I knew what his game plan was. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t have one, at least not yet. Maybe this is a tipping point where he could go one way or the other,” she said. “Honestly… there was a moment when I could have put a bullet in Clint’s head and gone back to my agency in Russia. He put his gun down and his hands up and asked me to come with him. I don’t know what exactly was different about him. He wasn’t the first person sent to kill me that couldn’t finish the job. That was my tipping point.”

“What do you think Fury’s going to decide?”

“I don’t know for sure. But I think he sees Loki as potentially useful, if he’s salvageable. There were plenty of people who thought he should have Bruce quietly killed just to get rid of the Hulk. Fury’s not one to waste potential just because there’s some risk involved. He took a risk with Clint. And with me. And we’re two of his best agents now. Taking the risk and giving someone with a bad past a second chance has paid off for him before. It might pay off now.”

“Even if he is going a different direction… why would I be… I mean, he’s not…”

“Not your type?” Natasha asked, grinning. “That’s the funny thing about attraction. Sometimes the people who really get under your skin are the ones who get all the wires crossed in your head.”

He raised his eyebrows curiously.

“Wires that don’t normally get crossed,” she said. “Danger, desire, fascination, fear, anger, curiosity… all of a sudden you’re getting all these signals mixed up in your head, and it’s kind of terrifying and kind of thrilling at the same time. Someone who does that to you… it doesn’t mean they’re good for you, but it means if you decide to take the ride, it’s going to be exciting. Sometimes it’s worth it to take the ride. Sometimes you end up really wishing you hadn’t. But it’s always a thrill while you’re on it.”

Steve nodded and leaned back against his stack of pillows. “So… is that what you wanted to talk to me about?”

“I wanted to tell you that I think it’s probably time I took the training wheels off,” she said, smiling. “I can teach you about sex. I can’t teach you about the rest of it.”

He blinked. “You think I should…”

“I’m not telling you what you should or shouldn’t do. At least, not specifically. But what you should do is find someone you have a real connection with and find out what sex is like when you’re really in love, because it’s pretty amazing.”

“You…”

She smiled, almost wistfully. “I was in love with Clint. I’m still in love with Clint. And we’ve… had amazing times together. But both of us are really good at ruining relationships. And I wasn’t willing to lose him. He’s my partner. He’s my best friend.”

Steve frowned and sat up. “When we were in the car and Loki said he’d been in love once.”

“Yeah? They live a long time.”

“You think maybe what you said… about only being really attracted to someone you really feel a connection to…”

“What, that’s why he’s only been in love once in all that time? Maybe,” she said, shrugging. Then she paused and glanced at Steve. “You’re thinking… I think Clint and I need to have a talk. Immediately.”

“You don’t think Clint was…”

“Whether they intended it or not, the cube gave them a more intimate connection than most people will ever have,” she said, standing up. “I had a feeling the thing about the tracking device wasn’t the only thing Clint was hiding from me.”

“Loki could have been talking about somebody else,” Steve suggested.

“He could have been,” Natasha agreed. “But something went really weird between Clint and Loki at some point, because whatever Loki wanted to do to Clint, he couldn’t finish the job.”

“Kind of like Clint with you?”

She glanced at him. “Yeah. Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. Good, actually. I mean… a little…”

“I get it,” she said, patting his knee again. “It’ll be fine. I mean, everything will be insane, like it usually is… but that seems to work for us somehow.”

“Maybe that was Fury’s plan.”

“Honestly, I’m pretty sure that Bruce and Tony sleeping together wasn’t part of his plan. And I KNOW Clint getting his BDSM fix from a demigod wasn’t part of his plan. But things don’t always go according to plan, do they?”

“No. They definitely don’t.”

 

 

 

 

 

Natasha found Clint sitting on the roof, bundled up in his coat against the chilly air. He nodded as she crossed her legs and settled down beside him, wrapping her arms around her shoulders.

“It’s freezing up here.”

Clint reached out an arm, opening his coat, and she tucked herself in as close to him as she could so he could wrap both of them up.

“You come up here to yell at me about the tracking bug thing?”

She shook her head. “Tony and Bruce took Loki down to the lab as soon as we got back and did a quick scan… found a tiny little chip in the back of his neck and put a wire in there and zapped it. It’s not broadcasting anything anymore.”

“I still…”

“That’s not the only secret you were keeping.”

He looked up at the sky. “Thor said he comes up here and listens to the universe and sometimes it answers his questions.”

“Is it answering yours?”

“Nope. Dead silence.”

“Then answer mine, Clint.”

“You already know. That’s why you’re asking. Loki said something and you put two and two together. You’re smart like that. I don’t know what he said…”

“He told Steve he’d only been in love once, and that person made it very clear they were never going to love him back.”

Clint’s arm tightened around her. “He didn’t mention that part. About it being the only time…”

“He might be lying about that.”

“I don’t think he is. But it doesn’t matter.”

“The day you went over there and instead of coming home in a taxi you showed up in front of the tower unconscious and half-dressed and bleeding?”

“Yeah,” Clint said, nodding slowly. “I think that’s when it all really went to shit… for him. I mean, I think he was confused already, but that was the day I think he’d decided he was going to finish it, kill me, end all of this. He even told me that every time he saw me he wanted to kill me, just to make the pain stop. And that was the day he was going to do it. But he couldn’t. I could see it in his eyes. He couldn’t finish it.”

“So you pushed him,” she said, shaking her head.

“I had to. If he was just waffling for a minute…”

“So you had to push him until he either killed you or completely lost it,” she said. “I never did quite understand some of your interrogation tactics, but that’s probably the stupidest one I’ve ever heard of.”

“Well, he didn’t kill me,” Clint said, hunching his shoulders.

“True, but that’s not really convincing me of the wisdom of your plan.”

He chuckled. “Didn’t figure it would. He snapped. He said he had nobody and that he loved me and that I was the only person who would ever understand him and that was only because the Tesseract forced me to, and that if I would love him back…”

“And at that point he was still more than ready to kill you, and you told him to go fuck himself.”

“I think those might have been my exact words, actually.”

She smiled. “Yeah. I figured. You’re kind of predictable that way.”

“So why exactly were Steve and Loki talking about their past romantic experiences?” Clint asked.

“That’s confidential.”

“Steve’s straight.”

“Yeah. So are Bruce and Tony, according to their files,” she said.

“And he’s Captain America.”

“That doesn’t mean what it meant in the 1940’s,” she said. “It’s not the same America.”

“But if he’s attracted to men, why hasn’t he paid any attention to all the… you know. Everything that goes on here.”

“I didn’t say he was attracted to men.”

“But he’s attracted to Loki.”

“I didn’t say that either.”

“You implied it,” he insisted.

“No… you inferred it from incomplete data.”

He scowled. “Whatever.”

She gave him her sweetest smile. “And if I even get a hint of a whisper of an idea that you’re even the tiniest bit jealous, after all the crap you’ve put us through, I will personally beat you within an inch of your life.”

“That’s not…”

“You were ready to put your fist through a wall when you thought Thor had slept with me.”

“Yeah, well. That’s different.”

She rested her head on his shoulder. “You should know I’d never fool around with someone you were in love with.”

“I didn’t say I…”

“No. I inferred it. From ample and well-supported data. And Thor’s crazy about you, and if Loki lays a finger on you again we’re going to have an Asgardian smackdown in the middle of the tower, so he’s off limits regardless. And I’m thinking that maybe the best way to get you out of his head and keep him from causing us all a lot of trouble is for someone to be nice to him and listen to him and keep him a little bit busy for a while.”

Clint snorted. “And you think Steve’s the guy for the job.”

“Not before I heard them talking,” she said. “An opportunity presented itself.”

“And you just happened to be right there to take advantage of it.”

“I’m not taking advantage of anything,” she argued, elbowing him. “I’m nudging things along. They were going that way anyway but Steve’s clueless and Loki’s insane, so I thought they needed a little push.”

“So the perfect partner for Captain Good-Guy is a batshit-crazy, compulsively lying alien war criminal.”

“I didn’t say it was perfect,” she said, shrugging. “I said it would keep them busy for a while.”

 

 

 

 

 

Steve had just settled into staring blankly at his book again when someone tapped on his door.

“Come in… I mean, JARVIS…”

The door slid open, leaving Loki staring at it with amusement.

“Is there an advantage to these mechanical doors and voices in the walls, or is it just for Tony Stark’s entertainment?”

“I think it’s a little of both,” Steve said. “As far as I know, most buildings still have regular doors, and I don’t think most of them have a JARVIS, but honestly, JARVIS is pretty helpful sometimes, especially when you’re trying to figure out one of Tony’s things and you’re ready to throw it against the wall.”

“If you are referring to Mr. Stark’s new toaster design that he instituted in the kitchen last week, Thor has already destroyed it with his hammer in retaliation for repeatedly burning his fingers,” JARVIS informed them.

Loki smiled. “You’re right. I do rather like him. Although I would imagine that it becomes tiresome being watched constantly.”

Steve shrugged. “You get used to it, sort of. It’s not really that different anywhere else, except that the other places don’t have a talking computer. There are cameras in all the stores, cameras on the street… they’ve got this thing now where you can look up any place in the world and a satellite out in space will find it for you and let you look just about in their window. And I guess you can get JARVIS to stop watching… Natasha just has to tell him to, but I think she has special clearance for that.”

“Actually, Agent Romanov’s ability to manage my programming is the result of a constant battle between her and Mr. Stark in which he develops security systems to keep her out of my programming and she then immediately defeats them. I would think it would grow tiresome, but they both seem to enjoy it.”

“Agent Romanov is the one who asked me to stop in and see you,” Loki said. “She didn’t say why. If it’s because I’ve been annoying my brother… I apologize, but it’s just too easy.”

Steve realized that Loki was still standing in the doorway, and that he could either sit at the table in the corner of the room or at the end of the bed where Natasha had been. He looked around, uncertain.

“You seem confused, Captain. Did I interrupt your reading?”

“Honestly, I don’t even know what book this is,” Steve sighed, tossing it on the bed and motioning for Loki to sit down in front of him.

Loki laughed and sat down at the foot of the bed, looking over at the book. “Difficulty concentrating?”

“You could say that.”

“I haven’t been able to focus properly on anything since… well, since the Tesseract. It made it blissfully easy to focus. It told me exactly what I needed to do. I had a purpose. It was all very clear. Until it wasn’t.”

“It was easier before,” Steve said. “There was a war. There were sides. You knew which one you were on. Now there are all kinds of wars and I don’t even understand which side is supposed to be the good guy, or maybe none of them are… did you say Natasha told you to come in here?”

“Yes. She said you wished to speak to me. I was wondering what you wished to speak to me about, since you seemed puzzled by my arrival.”

“I didn’t…”

“I’ll leave, if you prefer.”

“You don’t have to do that. I just… I guess she’s… you know what I was saying, about how someone’s always watching and listening to everything?”

Loki smiled. “She was listening to our conversation, before we were rudely interrupted by that pair of incompetents.”

Steve looked down at the book on the bed. “Umm. Yes.”

“And is she displeased that I attempted to persuade you to abandon your moral compass, Captain?”

Steve bit back a laugh. “Not exactly.”

Loki raised an eyebrow. “Not exactly?”

“She… umm… she seems to think… that I’d… you know, that I should try… things. With… someone. That I have… a connection with? Something about that.”

He knew his face was red and he couldn’t quite manage to put a coherent sentence together, but these weren’t exactly things he was used to talking about. When he heard Loki chuckle quietly to himself, he was sure he was being mocked, until Loki spoke.

“How does a man who does nothing but good and tells nothing but the truth find a connection with one who does nothing but wrong and tells nothing but lies?”

Steve looked up at him, eyes tracing the clean line of his face against the black hair falling across his cheek, and thought again that he should draw him, and that it should be just like this, with his head lowered, eyes fixed on something distant, the corners of his mouth raised into a smile that somehow seemed both amused and regretful.

“Have you told me lies?” he asked.

Loki’s eyes turned to him, green and intent. “No. But you have no reason to believe that. The word of a liar is worth nothing.”

“If you haven’t lied to me yet, your word is still worth something to me.”

“Hasn’t anyone told you that sort of blind trust will get you killed someday?”

Steve laughed. “You have no idea how many people have told me that. But Natasha’s pretty smart, and she’s a pretty good judge of character, and she wouldn’t have sent you in here if she thought you were going to kill me.”

“I might have lied about her sending me in here.”

“You didn’t.”

“No. You have been honest with me… I’m not accustomed to it. But I have tried to be honest with you in return.”

“That’s a start.”

Loki’s eyes were fixed on his face. “It can be the start of whatever you like. Or it can be nothing. I do not deserve…”

“Everybody deserves a chance,” Steve said, and there wasn’t much space between them, so when he found himself leaning forward, all it took was Loki turning his head to meet him and their lips brushed against each other, then found a firmer contact, warm and steady.

After a moment, Loki placed a hand on Steve’s chest and pushed him back a bit, eyes very bright.

“Does this feel wrong, Captain?”

“It wouldn’t if you would stop calling me ‘Captain’.”

“Well. That problem is easily remedied. What about the rest of the team waiting to torment you?”

Steve smiled. “Something tells me Natasha’s going to make really, really sure that they know that’s not a good idea.”

“You realize that her granting this her approval is likely an attempt to make certain I don’t trouble Agent Barton any further?”

“I thought of that. Were you planning on…”

“No. I have learned enough in this life to know where I am not welcome. I am not accustomed to feeling welcomed. Or to being trusted.”

“Then try not to mess it up.”

Loki grinned and leaned back in, letting his lips come to rest on the skin where Steve’s neck joined his shoulder. “I will do my best.”

Steve’s hands came up and he found his fingers running through sleek black hair, and as Loki’s mouth slid over his skin, he realized he understood exactly what Natasha had meant about people who got the wires in your head crossed, because he could feel the pathways that warned him of danger lighting up and then short-circuiting into the tangle of pleasure, and the circuits that told him not to do things knotted hopelessly with the ones that said he should, and she was right. It was a thrill.

Loki glanced down. “It doesn’t appear that you are adverse to this experience.”

Steve shifted in the loose pants he was wearing, trying to conceal his body’s reaction, which apparently was much more direct than his brain’s.

“I see no reason for embarrassment,” Loki said. “But perhaps a bit more of this would ease your mind.”

His mouth found Steve’s again, and Steve found himself kissing him back, hard, and tangling a hand in his hair to pull him in. Loki grinned against his lips.

“Agent Romanov seems to have trained you well.”

“I hope so,” Steve murmured. “No more training wheels.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Just… more of that.”

“I am happy to oblige.”

 

 

.  
.  
.


	34. Chapter 34

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Loki finds Steve extremely amusing. And then also maybe some other things. Tony and Bruce are more than willing to take Clint off Natasha's hands for a while, which is handy, because Natasha has some things she needs to discuss with Thor, and she'd really like the rest of them to shut up and go away for a change. 
> 
> .  
> .  
> .

“It sounds like the Bifrost is made out of subatomic particles that manage to exist simultaneously in multiple universes…” Bruce was explaining, when Natasha walked into the living room and shoved Clint into his lap. 

“It appears that your theory has just been made irrelevant,” Tony observed. 

“I see that,” Bruce said, looking up at Clint, who shrugged. 

“You guys get to keep him occupied for a while,” Natasha said. “I need to talk to Thor.”

Thor looked around. “I thought Loki was with you… he should not be unattended.”

“Steve can handle him.”

Clint snorted, and Tony raised his eyebrows. 

“I hope you don’t mean that like you would mean it if you were talking about someone other than Steve.”

She gave him an even look. “I am doing something. I am a professional. This is my job. If you fuck this up in any way, shape, or form, I will cause you to wish you had never seen my face, Stark. Is that clear?”

He gave her a thumbs-up. “Yup. All yours. None of our business. Absolutely none.”

Thor shook his head. “Wait… you don’t mean that Steve is…”

“Look, you come with me and we’ll talk. And Tony and Bruce are going to take Clint somewhere where he won’t cause any more trouble for a little while.”

“You realize we’re going to have to tie him down to make sure of that,” Tony said. 

Bruce nodded solemnly. “I have to agree. There really isn’t any way to keep Clint out of trouble if he’s not properly restrained.”

Clint grinned easily and leaned back against Bruce’s shoulder. “Well, Tony’s room has the best bed for that kind of thing. Which probably isn’t a coincidence.”

“Good. Get off my lap… you’re killing me.”

Clint stood up, and Natasha shooed Bruce and Tony after him. 

“If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were in a hurry,” Tony said. 

“I have things to do. I’m team security and we currently have any number of security risks going on, and I need to lock down as many of them as I can. So either go play in the lab or go fuck Clint, but let me get some work done, please.”

“Hmmm. Play in the lab… fuck Clint.”

“We can always play in the lab later,” Bruce said, taking Tony by the arm.

“Ooh! We could fuck Clint in the lab!”

“Haven’t we already determined that a room full of sharp metal things and dangerous chemicals probably isn’t the best place for threesomes?” 

“You’re never any fun,” Tony muttered. 

“I like how no one asks me about any of this,” Clint said, grinning. 

“That’s because we’ve already established that you will do anything, anytime, anywhere, for any reason, with complete disregard for your own safety,” Bruce reminded him. 

“Yeah, well… you know.”

“I think Natasha’s going to kill us with knives if we don’t go find somewhere else to be,” Tony said. “And since I’m not the most perceptive person, generally, I’d say that means she’s making it pretty obvious.”

“The only way I could make it more obvious would be to actually get out my knife,” she muttered. 

“Yup. Leaving now. Bye! Have fun with… security stuff. Or whatever.”

She stood with arms crossed until the elevator doors closed. 

“Are they gone?”

“Yes, ma’am,” JARVIS replied. 

“Good. I want a lockdown on Captain Rogers’ room… inform me if anything happens I should know about, and I’ll decide whether to notify the team.”

“Yes, ma’am. Am I to assume that your conversation with Thor, as all of your conversations regarding team security, is to be set to private and to be unlocked only with your permission?”

She smiled. “It’s a shame you’re not human, JARVIS. I would absolutely go on a date with you.”

“I appreciate the sentiment, Agent Romanov.”

Thor blinked. “What do you need to speak to me about? My brother? And Captain Steve?”

She glanced over her shoulder. “Let’s go into the conference room. I’ve got security on that locked down tighter than anywhere else except my bedroom.”

Thor followed her, still looking deeply puzzled. 

 

 

 

 

 

Clint landed on Tony’s bed hard enough to bounce, but he had no complaints, because by the time he’d put one together Tony was already on top of him and pinning his hands down beside his head while Bruce rummaged in the drawers. 

“It was nice of Natasha to give you to us to play with,” Tony said, looking down at him, “but I’m a little suspicious. What kind of trouble are you in now?”

“None, that I know of,” Clint said. “Besides the whole bringing Loki here thing, but…”

Bruce chuckled as he sat down on the bed with a pair of black leather cuffs and began buckling them around Clint’s wrists while Clint watched with interest. 

“What’s so funny?” Tony asked. 

“She’s not trying to keep him out of trouble. She’s making sure all three of us are occupied so we don’t mess up her plans,” Bruce said. 

“What… you don’t seriously mean she’s…”

Clint laughed. “Steve and Loki? Yeah. I didn’t see that coming either.”

“I thought she was messing with me,” Tony muttered, shaking his head.

“Hey,” Clint said, shifting underneath him. “Pay attention. You’ve got more urgent things to worry about.”

Tony shook his head. “Sorry. I’m just…”

Bruce shrugged and finished buckling the cuffs. “You have to admit, it’s not a horrible thing to think about. I mean, visually, anyway. You have to admit Loki’s pretty.”

He glanced down at Clint, but Clint just grinned his agreement. Tony pressed a hand to his forehead. 

“I can’t imagine Captain Tightpants doing sex things with anyone, much less with Loki,” he muttered. “I mean… he couldn’t be any more vanilla…”

“Maybe he’s going to learn a few things,” Bruce said. “What did you do with the attachments for these things?”

“Ugh. He can’t. I can’t see Steve Squeaky Clean Rogers ever getting into kink…”

Clint’s face changed, a shift sudden enough that Bruce and Tony both stopped and looked down at him, and Bruce laid a hand on his chest. 

“What? You OK? We can stop talking about…”

“No. It’s fine. It’s just… “

“You know things about Loki we don’t,” Bruce said, his hand rubbing lightly. 

“I’m just thinking that he might know a lot about how it works… but I don’t think any of his actual experience with it has been the kind you actually want,” Clint said. “I mean… I don’t think he knows any kind of life where he isn’t either hurting or being hurt.”

“Doesn’t sound like anyone we know,” Tony said, running his fingers through Clint’s hair. 

“Yeah, well… I’ve been hurt, but not like that. Not… you didn’t see… it doesn’t matter. Just… maybe what he needs is someone who will never hurt him, even if he thinks he wants them to. Someone who just completely doesn’t put sex and pain in the same box in their head.”

“I don’t think Steve even lets them in the same room,” Tony said. 

“Just saying… maybe that’s a good thing, if you’re looking for a partner for someone who has no idea what it’s like to feel safe.”

“It’s still weird.”

Bruce rolled his eyes. “Get over it. Or go sit in the corner and be freaked out, but I’d really like to get on with fucking Clint here.”

Clint hummed his agreement and shifted his hips up against Tony, making sure he could feel his cock through his jeans. Tony sighed. 

“All right, all right. But can we not talk about anybody doing sex things with Captain Tightass?”

Clint glanced at Bruce and grinned. “Are you starting to get the idea that Tony wanted to be the one to un-tighten Cap’s ass?”

“What? Hell. No. I didn’t… no.”

Bruce grinned. “Of course not.”

“Fuck off,” Tony muttered. 

“Besides, I think Steve would be a top anyway,” Clint said. “You know. Pull rank.”

“I don’t know…” Bruce mused. “Sometimes those authority types like to have somebody take their authority away for a little while. I’m betting he’s a bottom.”

“If you two don’t knock it off, I’m leaving,” Tony sighed. 

“Technically, I outrank you both, since you’re civilians,” Clint said. 

“Then why are you the one cuffed to the bed with Bruce taking your pants off?”

Clint shrugged. “I guess I’m just cooperative.”

Bruce rolled his eyes. “Yeah. ‘Cooperative’ and ‘Clint’ are two words that always go together in my mind.”

Clint shifted to let Bruce drag his pants the rest of the way off. “You know how cooperative I can be if I’m in the right state of mind.”

“Yeah,” Bruce said, “but getting you there is a bitch.”

“Gotta earn your reward.”

Bruce glanced at Tony. “Maybe we should make him earn something for a change.”

Clint raised his eyebrows. “Huh? What?”

Bruce patted his head. “You’re going to stay right there, with your hands where you can’t do anything, and I’m going to lay Tony down right here next to you and I’m going to fuck him till he forgets how to talk, and you’re not going to be allowed to do a thing about it until you decide to play nice.”

Clint scowled. “You won’t.”

“Watch me.”

 

 

 

 

“What do you need to speak to me about that the others cannot hear?” Thor asked, concerned, as Natasha checked the keypad by the door to make sure her override code was in place. “Has my brother done something…”

“Your brother is fine, as far as I know,” she said, turning around. “Nothing’s wrong. Well, I mean, nothing more than the usual, which is everything, but we’re used to that.”

He shifted his feet uncertainly. “Clint is well? There is no…”

“I was up on the roof talking to Clint,” she explained. “We had a very interesting discussion, and that’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

“A discussion about my brother? Are you sure it’s safe to leave him with Captain Steve? Loki might trick him into…”

“I think Steve’s going to handle the whole thing surprisingly well,” she said, smiling slightly. “He’s… let’s just say he’s a natural talent.”

“You… they were jesting when they said… you don’t mean that you allowed Loki…”

She leaned against the table. “I didn’t allow anything. Steve is a grown-up. And if Loki’s playing him for something, it’ll be a lesson learned, and if he’s not, it’ll be good for both of them.”

“Victims of Loki’s play frequently end up dead.”

“They used to,” she said. “Before the Tesseract. And Clint.”

“That doesn’t mean he is harmless.”

“None of us are harmless. Do you think they call me the Black Widow because it’s a cute nickname? I’m dangerous.”

Thor crossed his arms. “If he hurts Captain Steve…”

“I don’t think that’s going to happen,” she said. “Loki may be crazy, but he’s not stupid. He’s very intelligent and he knows that there are bounty hunters all over the galaxy looking to hunt him down, and that for some reason Thanos is apparently upping the stakes. We’re the only allies he has. He’s not going to do anything stupid enough to make us throw him out of this tower because right now having the entire team together may be the only thing that’s protecting any of us. We’re strong together and Loki knows as long as he’s with us, he’s protected, but if he fucks that up, he’s out of luck. I’m not saying he’s not dangerous. I’m just saying he’s smart enough to know how to keep himself from getting killed.”

“He is,” Thor said. “But he is arrogant and stubborn.”

She grinned. “You realize that’s exactly how Jane Foster described you.”

“Hmph. I am not arrogant. Nor am I stubborn.”

“Of course not. Look… I didn’t bring you in here to talk about Loki.”

“Then it must be about Clint…”

“Sort of,” she said. “More about that conversation I told you we had. You remember when Clint thought that you and I…”

“He was not pleased.”

“No. But he got over it because he knows I would never fool around with someone he was seriously involved with…”

“Of course not…”

“Without his permission.”

Thor blinked. 

“He apparently feels a little differently about it now. After… Loki and everything. This team… it’s the first time he and I have ever had anybody we could trust besides each other. And for Clint, finding out that he wasn’t going to push you away no matter what kind of stupid ridiculous Clint think he went off and did…”

“He nearly succeeded,” Thor said. “In pushing me away, that is. But I love him.”

“I think he’s figured that out, eventually. I don’t know if he’s ever told you, but you know he loves you too.”

Thor smiled. “I would hope so, after what I have tolerated.”

“Well… that’s sort of where the thing about his permission comes in,” she said. 

Thor glanced at her. “Permission for what?”

“He knows that he and I have similar… needs. And that unlike him, I’m extremely selective about who I’m willing to trust to deal with those needs. I came to you once before because…”

“I remember,” he said, his tone fond. “But you were very specific that there be no…”

“No sex. No sexual contact. Because at least that way I could tell Clint honestly that I would never do that to him. Except that now, he says… he says he knows I need that and he knows you’re the only person I can trust to give it to me, and… this time, all of it.”

“Are you certain this is what he wants?”

She smiled and stepped toward him. “I’m sure. Ask JARVIS.”

“Sir, Agent Barton did state his feelings regarding this matter quite specifically, although not in language I would prefer to use.”

“He told me,” she said, taking Thor’s large hand in her much smaller one, “that you had plenty to go around and that it would be very entertaining to think about you fucking me.”

Thor stared at her, still bewildered. She rolled her eyes. 

“Look, if you’re not interested, just say so.”

“Natasha… you are beautiful and you are brilliant and I am very interested… what about Captain Steve?”

“He’s fine. I was never the right person for him. I taught him a lot, but he needs somebody who needs him back. He’s a fixer. He needs someone who needs to be fixed.”

“So you sent him my brother,” Thor said, grinning. “Why did you not send Clint to him for fixing?”

“Because Clint’s an asshole. And he needs someone to hurt him. Your brother might be crazy and he might have some serious issues, but if nothing else, he does have some manners… and I don’t think he needs to be hurt anymore.”

“No. He has had enough hurt,” Thor said. “Enough for many lifetimes. You, on the other hand… if memory serves me, it has been some time since you had the sort of hurt you desire, and while this conference room does have a table, it does not have the sort of items I would generally find handy in administering this hurt.”

“Your room does, though.”

“It does.”

“JARVIS, can Thor and I walk to his room without running into anyone?”

“It appears that all of the other team members are… quite occupied,” JARVIS replied. 

“Good. Let’s go.”

 

 

 

 

Steve wasn’t quite certain how he ended up with Loki pinned to the bed underneath him; he wasn’t sure if the almost serpentine flexibility was unique to whatever kind of beings Thor and Loki were, or perhaps just to Loki, but it was somehow both exciting and infuriating. 

“Don’t you ever hold still?” he asked, finally getting his hands around Loki’s wrists and his weight resting on his thighs to keep him from moving. 

Loki grinned up at him. “You didn’t seem to mind.”

“No, but I’m trying to kiss you and you keep squirming away. I told you, if you don’t…”

Loki’s grin faded and his gaze drifted to the side. “I am not accustomed to kissing.”

“What’s wrong with kissing?” Steve asked, frowning. “First Natasha said she didn’t like kissing because it’s too intimate… although I don’t know how kissing is more intimate than… you know… but why don’t you like it?”

“I didn’t say I didn’t like it. I said I wasn’t accustomed to it.”

“Your answers really aren’t very helpful sometimes.”

“You should probably learn to expect that.”

Steve sighed. “How am I supposed to figure out how to…”

“How to do what? The mechanics are fairly straightforward,” Loki said, smirking. “Surely your education involved at least a basic…”

“I’m trying to figure out what you like so I can make you feel good because that’s what you’re supposed to do when you’re in bed with somebody!” Steve snapped. 

Loki blinked and his smirk lost some of its smugness. “Oh.”

“Oh? Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?”

“I suppose it is,” Loki murmured. 

Steve sat back and released his hands, but didn’t let him up. “Stop playing games with me.”

“It’s all I know how to do,” he said quietly. “No one has ever concerned themselves with what I wanted before. I’m not sure I even know. It’s always been a game, played for entertainment or for something more devious, but always a game. Sometimes a game played at my expense, with me as the unwilling toy. Always with a purpose. And that purpose was never my pleasure.”

“That isn’t how it’s supposed to be,” Steve said firmly. 

“Are you going to be the one to prove it to me?” Loki asked, and Steve wasn’t sure if it was a question or a challenge or some kind of a threat, but he didn’t care. 

“Yes. But you’re going to have to at least try to cooperate, okay? Because I’m really not exactly an expert at any of this and it would really help if you would… you know. Talk to me.”

Loki’s gaze turned thoughtful for a moment, then fixed on Steve’s face. “Very well. I… would like you to kiss me again. And I promise to hold still.”

And that part was easy enough, the kissing, but it did involve bodies rubbing together in ways that made it impossible for either of them to hold still, and it became clear that something else needed to happen. Steve sat back, drawing an annoyed groan from Loki. 

“Now what?”

“Is it okay if I take of my shirt?”

“It would be preferable if you stop wasting time and take off the rest of your clothes as well. And you might as well assist me with mine.”

“I didn’t want to do anything you weren’t ready for yet,” Steve said, defensive. 

Loki laughed. “Your chivalrous idiocy is charming. Nothing you do will frighten or alarm me.”

“That’s not the point. The point is whether you want it.”

“Oh. In that case… I very much want both of us to be naked as quickly as possible, and then for kissing to resume without the obstacle of clothing.”

“See? That’s better.”

There were some things that Natasha hadn’t been able to teach Steve, since she really only had the proper equipment to educate him on the female anatomy, but he knew enough about his own to have some reasonable idea how the male parts worked. She had given him some advice regarding certain things that might be done to those male parts that Steve didn’t know why he’d need to know, since he never planned to have his mouth anywhere near another man’s cock, but the advice did seem to come in handy now. At least he didn’t seem to be doing anything wrong, since Loki’s sarcasm seemed to be incompatible with gasping for breath and curling his fingers through Steve’s hair, which was surprisingly pleasant. He certainly couldn’t manage the kind of stunts Natasha could, and found himself wondering how the hell she possibly managed it without choking herself, but Loki seemed more than happy with what Steve was able to manage, and with his hand wrapped around the rest of it. 

When Loki pulled his head back he wondered for a moment if he’d done something wrong, but then he found himself suddenly on his back with Loki kissing him hard, demanding and eager.

“I want you.”

“If you mean… I don’t know if I know how to do that. I mean, without hurting you. Or did you mean you wanted to do that to me…. I don’t…”

Loki lowered his head and grinned. “You are beyond ridiculous. If I didn’t know better, I would think someone was trying to fool me into believing that anyone like you could possibly exist. How has the world not managed to destroy you yet?”

“I won’t let it.”

“I want you to fuck me, if I am even permitted to use that word in your presence.”

Steve flushed. “I’m… getting used to it. Tony and Clint kind of use it a lot.”

“Are you willing to do that?”

“Is that really what you want or just what you think will make me happy?”

Loki cocked his head. “I’ve never been asked that before.”

“Well, answer it.”

“Yes, it’s what I want. I would also like an opportunity to do the same to you, but you are far less accustomed to coupling with other men and there are things that we should take our time in teaching you before we attempt that step. So for now… yes, I would like you to fuck me.”

Steve felt his face turn the shade of red that it seemed only he among the Avengers was capable of. “Will you… umm… I need to you teach me how to…”

“Prepare properly?” Loki asked. “You will find I need much less preparation than a mortal would, since I am harder to damage…”

“I’m not looking to not damage you. I’m looking to… make it good. If I can.”

Loki smiled. “Something tells me you are quite capable of it. Is there some sort of oil or…”

Steve reached for the nightstand. “Tony stocks this in pretty much every room in the tower.”

“Excellent. I will keep that in mind for future reference.”

It was a bit strange at first, working on the same person who was giving him rather impersonal and somewhat irreverent instructions, but Steve found that the more he focused on figuring out what was good, the more the instructions stopped sounding like a bored biology teacher’s lecture and started sounding more like gasps and breathless demands. And if Loki wasn’t very coherent about what to do with his fingers, Steve figured it out when a few experimental twists had Loki’s hips arching off the bed and his hands grasping at the blankets. 

“That is… more than enough… preparation,” Loki exhaled, reaching for him. 

“You sure?”

“Yes, you impossibly ignorant mortal!”

“If you’re going to be rude…”

“Please…”

“See? That always works.”

Which, of course, it did, because if anybody could say no to a lithe, squirming Loki with green eyes gone dark and wide and strands of black hair clinging to his flushed face, it would have to be somebody else, because at this point Steve wasn’t going to. Especially if he said ‘please’. 

 

 

.


	35. Chapter 35

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nick Fury is used to having people stop what they're doing and answer him when he calls. The Avengers are not those people, especially when what they're doing is a lot more fun than talking to Fury. When someone does finally get around to having a chat with him, he has a plan... but not one that everyone's going to be happy about. 
> 
> .  
> .  
> .

This time Thor had remembered to make use of the noise-cancelling headset that he’d procured from the lab, so when JARVIS interrupted to inform them that Director Fury was on the line and wished to speak with Natasha immediately, she heard nothing. 

“Agent Romanov is occupied,” Thor said quietly, reaching down to stroke one slender but wiry arm where it was strapped to the bed above her head. 

“Yes, sir, but Director Fury…”

“Will have to wait.”

“He says…”

“He will have to wait.”

“Sir…”

“Will it be necessary for me to put my fist through the device that your voice is coming out of in order to silence you, JARVIS?”

“No, sir. That will not be necessary.”

“Good.”

Natasha hummed wordlessly and turned her face against his hand. He smiled and stroked her cheek, pleased with this Midgardian invention that allowed him to free her from as many distractions as possible. Blindfolds, of course, were something he was quite familiar with, but it had been much easier to take her down when the only senses she had available were smell, taste, and touch. She stretched her arms, lazily tested the cuffs holding her bare ankles to the foot of the bed, and smiled slightly. The concept of safewords had been explained to him, and she knew that he’d be able to hear it even if she couldn’t hear anything, but he doubted she would use a safeword any more than Clint would; he didn’t think he was willing to hurt either of them nearly enough for them to decide it was more than they could take. He would break before they did, these two mortals with their easily wounded bodies and their closely guarded hearts. He would not be the one to break them. Perhaps, if they were lucky, no one would break them anymore. Not if he had a hand in it, anyway. 

The scars written across her skin were different than Clint’s; many of his looked to have been inflicted with the intent of causing pain. Many of hers were deeper, more permanent, tightening the skin around them. Wounds meant to kill. He touched one small, deep scar on the side of her chest with one finger. She inhaled, but didn’t move away. 

He found himself wondering suddenly what Loki’s body would look like if his skin bore scars to spell out the story of the lifetime of pain and abuse he had suffered. He shook his head and forced the thought away; he could muse about Loki later, but when he had a partner down this deep and dependent on him to recognize and understand what they needed, they deserved his full attention. 

 

 

 

“Captain Rogers, Director Fury needs to speak with you…”

Steve squirmed enough to get his head free of the blankets and glare at the speaker. “I’m sort of busy, JARVIS.”

“I understand, but Director Fury…”

Loki shoved the blankets back and sat up, scowling. “Instruct Director Fury to have some patience, and suggest he occupy himself by inserting sharp objects into his…”

Steve clamped a hand over Loki’s mouth, feeling him smirk against his palm. 

“Tell him I’ll call him as soon as I’m… not busy.”

“He will not be pleased with this answer…”

Steve hesitated for a moment, but then Loki’s slender and incredibly dexterous fingers wrapped around his cock and started working at coaxing it back to hardness, and thanks to the serum it was more than willing to go another round, and Steve forgot all about whatever he was going to say to JARVIS and let himself be pulled back down to the bed. 

“I’m not finished with you yet,” Loki murmured, nipping at the skin of his neck. “You’ve done a more than satisfactory job of satisfying me, considering that you’re still learning, but there are still things I would very much like to do to you… if you would allow it.”

Steve couldn’t help but grin, his usual strictly maintained modesty temporarily evaporated by the knowledge that he’d managed to please a demigod. 

“I think… as long as it’s not something that involves anyone getting hurt…”

“You’re really not willing to hurt me. At all. Even if I want you to,” Loki said, looking at him with unreadable green eyes. 

“No. Not happening. If that’s what you had planned…”

“Actually,” Loki said, smiling, “I had thought that you might let me return the favor and show you how enjoyable it can be to have another man take you. If you are willing… I promise I will do as much as I can to make it pleasurable and avoid any pain, but it may be uncomfortable if you aren’t accustomed to…”

Steve propped himself up on one elbow and studied the long, wiry, elegant length of the body stretched out beside him, and even if part of his brain was shouting that real men would never allow someone to do that to them, he found that it was remarkably easy to ignore it when Loki was looking back at him with those bright eyes that fixed on him like he was something that wasn’t real and might disappear at any moment. 

“Something being uncomfortable because you’re not used to it is different than hurting somebody on purpose,” he said. 

“It is,” Loki agreed. “But…”

Steve frowned. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I just find myself on the verge of speaking honestly, and for most of my life, speaking honestly has been a reason for people to hurt me.”

Steve reached out and brushed aside the dark hair obscuring his face. “You can say whatever you want. I’d never hurt someone just for saying what they thought. That’s… you know the whole Captain America thing? That’s one of the parts I really believe… that means a lot to me. America’s supposed to be a place where your thoughts and your words are free and no one can punish you for having your own ideas, even if they don’t like them. That matters.”

“Hmm. That place is not Asgard.”

“It’s not always America, either. But it’s supposed to be. So tell me what you were thinking.”

“I was thinking,” he said, “that I have spent most of my life learning that if I did not hurt others, they would turn and hurt me, and so I felt no guilt and no shame for being the one to strike first… it was a lesson I had to learn.”

“Like Clint and Natasha. They never give anyone a chance to be the one to hit them first. At least, not before we all ended up here. They’re both… sort of different now. At least with the team. Maybe not to outsiders.”

“That’s what is so odd,” Loki murmured. “You see, as willing as I am to strike at anyone with little or no reason other than to make sure they do not have the opportunity to do it to me… I find your…”

He trailed off for a moment, chuckling to himself. 

“Your willingness to trust me is ridiculous. Your refusal to hurt me even when you know I could destroy you is beyond foolish. Your innocence borders on deliberate idiocy. And yet, if I am honest, I find myself disturbed by the idea of causing you pain or harm. Normally I would find it amusing to break someone so stupid. But I can’t… I don’t want to hurt you. And I don’t know why.”

Steve shrugged. “Maybe it would be too easy.”

“What?”

“To hurt me. If you wanted to. I’m right here, naked, with no weapons, and I’m pretty sure you’re strong enough to kill me hand-to-hand even if you didn’t have magic, which you do. It would be easy.”

“Yes… but then this would be over,” Loki murmured, lowering his eyes and letting his hand trace down Steve’s chest. “I assume it will be over shortly anyway…”

“Why?”

“You can’t possibly intend this to be more than…”

Steve gave him a sharp look. “I don’t… sleep around. This isn’t for fun. I mean, it is fun, but it’s not just for fun. Not for me. You don’t want it to be just for fun either, do you?”

Loki refused to meet his eyes, but he shook his head. 

“No. But I would not have shamed myself by asking you…”

Steve ran his fingers through that impossibly dark hair again. “Are you lying to me?”

“No. Lying would be much easier. This is quite…”

“Makes you feel kind of naked, doesn’t it? Stripped bare, nowhere to hide?”

Loki looked up at him with haunted eyes. “Something like that.”

“It’s okay,” Steve said. “That’s not always a bad thing.”

“Do you think Director Fury was calling about me?”

“It doesn’t matter. There were things you wanted to do. And… I’m willing to try them.”

“Is Captain America shirking his duties?” Loki asked, raising a hand to his mouth in shock. 

“You must be a bad influence,” Steve said, and kissed him. 

“I’m always a bad influence,” Loki murmured against his lips. “I’m the god of bad influences.”

“Oh, well.”

 

 

 

 

“Mr. Stark…”

Tony’s only answer was an incoherent mumble from where he was sprawled on the bed next to Clint with his face in a pillow. Clint grinned, but couldn’t answer because Bruce had gotten tired of his sarcastic commentary and gagged him, and Bruce couldn’t answer because he wasn’t going to stop what he was doing to Clint’s cock with his mouth just for that. 

“Mr. Stark?” JARVIS tried again. 

“Busy,” Tony mumbled. 

“Sir, Director Fury…”

“Tell him I’m drunk. Hammered. Shit-faced. Useless to anyone.”

“But sir, you have consumed no alcohol…”

“Just tell him that and he’ll leave me alone.”

“He will instruct me to call Dr. Banner next.”

“Busy,” Bruce said, before lowering his head again. 

“Dr. Banner…”

“You heard the man,” Tony said. “He’s busy. And don’t bother to call Clint. He’s… umm… running a training scenario. And we’re not supposed to pull him out of it. So we’re all busy. Except me and I’m drunk. Call Natasha…”

“She’s busy, sir.”

“Then call Steve.”

“He is also busy, sir.”

Tony blinked. “Captain Tightpants called in too busy to answer a call from Fury?”

Clint snorted, and Bruce raised his head. 

“I figured Loki would have to be amazing in bed, but if he’s amazing enough to make Captain America ignore a call from headquarters…”

“Damn,” Tony muttered, impressed. 

Clint made a protesting noise, and Bruce grinned and stroked his head. 

“Yeah, yeah. You’re pretty good too.”

Clint made another noise that sounded a lot like him telling them both to fuck off, but there was a slightly desperate tone to it, and Bruce figured he’d better get back to what he’d been doing and finally let the poor guy over the edge they’d been riding him on (not that he didn’t deserve it). And he vowed that while doing so, he would only be thinking a little bit about what Loki and Steve would look like tangled up in bed together. 

 

 

 

 

After several messages from JARVIS about how displeased Director Fury was and Tony finally threatening to shut the AI off completely if he didn’t leave them alone, everything proceeded without interruption. Eventually, however, Bruce insisted that he needed a shower and some food, and while having Clint and Tony join him in the shower didn’t do much to get anyone any cleaner, they did manage to put on decent clothes and make it to the living room. 

“Hello,” Loki said cheerfully. He was sitting on the couch, eating popcorn and watching TV. 

“Wait… what?”

“It’s fine,” Steve said, emerging from the kitchen with another bowl of popcorn. “I figured you guys would be out pretty soon, so I was…”

“Are we supposed to be leaving him unsupervised?” Bruce asked. 

Loki rolled his eyes. “You realize I can disappear and materialize in another universe any time I wish to, which makes keeping an eye on me rather futile. Either put me back in my electrically shielded cell in your lab or sit down and watch the movie.”

Tony glanced at Bruce, who shrugged and flopped down on the couch. “Pass the popcorn.”

Steve handed him the bowl, then sat down, deliberately placing himself between Loki and the others. Loki chuckled. 

“They don’t look inclined to start a fight at the moment. Actually, they look like they’ve spent most of the day engaged in activities somewhat similar to ours.”

Tony was surprised to notice that Steve’s face only turned a faint flush of red, and that instead of clenching his jaw he just grinned. 

“Okay, that’s it. You’ve murdered Captain Tightpants and replaced him with someone almost normal,” he protested. 

Loki grinned. “He needs more work before we can declare Captain Tightpants truly deceased, but I believe much progress has been made.”

Steve turned a little redder and jabbed an elbow into Loki’s side. “Don’t tell them anything. Tony’s the world’s biggest gossip.”

“Am not.”

“Well, you’re the tower’s biggest gossip.”

“That would technically be JARVIS, since he watches all of us all the time,” Clint pointed out. 

“Unlike Mr. Stark,” JARVIS replied, “I do not provide information unless it is requested. And are any of you planning on returning Director Fury’s call, since you are now clearly not busy?”

“Still busy,” Tony said. 

“He doesn’t want to talk to me or Tony anyway,” Bruce said. 

Steve sighed. “I guess it’s probably my job. And I’ve already seen this movie. I’ll go in the conference room. JARVIS, will you get Fury on video phone?”

“Of course, sir,” JARVIS said, sounding far more smugly satisfied than any computer should be capable of. 

“Good. You deal with Fury. I’ve got something else to do,” Clint said, heading for the elevator.

“Umm… hang on,” Tony said, raising his hand. “You just going to leave us here with the god of disasters?”

Steve gave him an even look. “I spent all day with him, and I’m okay. You’ll live.”

Bruce completely failed to muffle his snicker, and Tony glared at him. Loki shrugged and took another handful of popcorn. 

“Even a god needs some time to recover after vigorous activity,” he said casually, making sure Steve heard him on his way out. 

“Stop that,” Tony muttered. 

“Why? Since when do you object to any conversation regarding anything of a blatantly sexual nature?”

“I don’t. But if you keep talking about you and Cap, Bruce is going to start daydreaming about it again and get a hard-on and I’m too tired to deal with him and Clint left.”

“Damnit, Tony…” Bruce said, burying his head in his hands. 

Loki grinned. “Is there something I should know, Dr. Banner?”

“No.”

“He thinks you and Captain Tightpants are hot.”

“Tony, fuck off.”

“And he thinks…”

Loki raised a hand. “No need to continue, Stark. Dr. Banner clearly has a sense of aesthetic appreciation for beauty that you entirely lack, if the design of your tower and your impressively attention-demanding suit are any indication. I appreciate Dr. Banner’s sophisticated taste in sexual fantasies and lament that he has been paired with such a crude and vulgar individual unable to recognize beauty if it was inserted into his anus.”

Tony blinked at him. Bruce settled back against the couch and smiled. 

“I think I could get to like you, Loki.”

“He’s a dick,” Tony muttered. 

“If that’s the best comeback Tony can come up with after you insult him, I’m almost sure I like you,” Bruce said. 

Loki nodded graciously. “You’re welcome.”

 

 

 

 

Clint stood outside Thor’s door, uncertain whether he should disturb any ongoing activities by knocking or requesting entry, but after a moment the door slid open, so he stepped into the room, letting his eyes adjust to the low light. 

Thor was stretched out on the bed, naked and grinning broadly.

“Clint. I’m pleased to see you. Is this…”

Clint looked at the slender figure lying next to him on the bed. There were no marks on her wrists or anywhere anyone would see them, but across her back he could see the thin red lines, and he knew without even really thinking about it that they’d been made with the thinner, more flexible whip and not the thicker one Clint liked. It made sense, of course; Natasha preferred her pain cleaner, more focused, while Clint liked his more bruising and unyielding. With her hair in disarray and the blindfold still covering her eyes, she looked young and peaceful. Thor ran a hand over her shoulder affectionately. 

“It was kind of you to let her have this,” he said quietly. 

“Well… if you put up with me just about getting killed chasing your brother, I figured I didn’t have any reason to think you’d just…”

“Change my mind about my feelings for you? Of course not.”

He patted the bed beside Natasha. Clint hesitated for a moment, but then climbed onto the bed. Natasha stirred and her hands came up, but as soon as they touched Clint’s face she smiled and let her head fall back against the pillow. 

“Hey, you.”

“Hi,” he said. “You mind if I…”

She grabbed his shirt lazily and pulled him closer, and Thor hooked a strong arm over both of them, and his grin was so pleased and content that any lingering doubts in Clint’s mind were driven away by the sheer brightness of it. He snuggled down against Natasha’s warm body, pressed a quick kiss against Thor’s hand, and let himself be at peace. 

 

 

 

 

Steve expected a lecture from Fury about being irresponsible and not being available when called upon, but Fury just muttered something about it being about time someone had decided to do their fucking job and then asked him about Loki. 

“He’s in the living room with the rest of the team,” Steve said. “He hasn’t tried anything that would cause any trouble, as far as I know.”

“Not yet, anyway. Maybe he’s not going to. Before he showed up, we had two test subjects who’d been affected by the cube’s mind-control force that we were monitoring… Barton and Selvig. Barton seems to be recovering, but don’t think I don’t know that something really fucked up happened over there to make that happen. And Selvig is off his rocker, but I’m not sure he was on it to begin with.”

“So what about Loki? You realize the cube was controlling him too, right?”

Fury nodded. “We’re starting to get that impression. See, these two bounty hunters you guys brought us… between the two of them they’re three or four screwdrivers short of a toolkit, but they’ve been talking like three-year-olds on a sugar rush since we got them. They know more than they think they do.”

“Like what?”

“We suspected that Thanos never really intended to let Loki rule Earth, at least not for very long, since his thing isn’t ruling planets; it’s destroying them. He started with his own… and everyone on it. And he’s not stopping there.”

“He just… likes destroying things?”

“He’s trying to impress Death. It’s a long story. But basically, yeah, he just likes destroying things. Up until recently, Earth was sort of an unknown and no one had really come here and tested out what the humans were capable of in terms of defense or strategy. Loki was Thanos’s first experiment. I think Thanos expected him to fail, either immediately or in the long term. I don’t think he expected that Asgard would get involved or that the cube would end up back there. He doesn’t have the resources to take on all of Asgard yet… but I think he’s working on it.”  
Steve frowned. “What makes you think that?”

“From what these idiot bounty hunters are telling us, Thanos has been putting out a lot of conflicting information about these bounties, how much they are, who is worth more, whether he wants them dead or alive or either way. Normally the way this game works is that a hunter or a team takes the contract and goes after the target. Thanos has thrown contracts out the window and sent everybody out at once, with conflicting information.”

“What’s the point in that?”

“Covering his bases,” Fury said. “If one hunter thinks you’re the big target, and another one thinks Bruce is, and it goes like that, instead of squabbling for the biggest one they’re all hunting different targets. There’s only one thing that’s consistent… Thor is the big prize. And he wants him alive, unharmed.”

“Why Thor?”

“Thanos is going for Asgard,” Fury said. “He wants the cube. But he has to weaken Asgard first and having Thor as his own brainwashed minion to use against them would be pretty devastating. One he gets the cube, my guess is he’s coming for Earth, and he doesn’t want the Avengers here when he does.”

“Why Earth?”

Fury glanced sideways before answering in a low voice. “The cube isn’t the only one.”

“The only what?”

“They’re called infinity stones. The cube isn’t the only one. We have reason to believe that there are more and that one of them is here on Earth, being hidden. We don’t know who has it or why, and they obviously haven’t figured out how to use it for much yet… they may not even know what it is.”

“So what’s our mission?”

“These bounty hunters are another test. Sending Loki gave him an idea what the team is capable of, what we’re capable of. He doesn’t want to come down here himself, not yet. If he knew where the other stone was, he’d have come for it already. I think he’s hoping it will flush itself out if he sends some of his army to put pressure on. But he isn’t going to do that until he’s sure the Avengers aren’t going to screw up his plans. He wants you all dead, and he wants Thor for his personal use.”

“So how do we deal with them?”

“According to Dumb and Dumber here, there’s a team of bounty hunters, a very professional, very well-known team, and they’ve made it known that they’re laying claim to these bounties and that nobody else is allowed to touch them. It sounds like people are intimidated enough that once this team has made a claim, nobody generally fucks with it.”

“So if we beat them, the rest of the bounty hunters get the idea that maybe we’re not worth it.”

“That’s the plan. Bounty hunters like money but they don’t like getting killed for it. They calculate their risks. We have to show them your team is too big a risk.”

Steve leaned back in his chair. “So we just wait for this team to come hunting us? I don’t like that idea much.”

“Neither do I,” Fury said. “Which is why it’s handy that we’ve got someone to use as bait.”

Steve kept his face expressionless despite the chill that ran up his spine. 

“You’re talking about Loki.”

“He’s exactly what we need…”

“Look, I don’t know a lot about fishing, but I know what happens to the bait,” Steve said. 

“That’s not relevant,” Fury said. “If he’s willing to take this risk and make this work, I can convince the higher-ups to let him stay on Earth. If he won’t, he’s getting sent back to Asgard as a prisoner.”

“That’s not really fair to put someone in that…”

“This isn’t about fair, and he’s lucky we didn’t have him shot on sight. He’s a war criminal. This is his reparation. He lets us use him as bait to bring in this team of bounty hunters, and if he comes out alive at the end, we give him a pass to stay.”

Steve muttered something under his breath that might have been a very bad word. Fury looked mildly surprised. 

“Did you just curse?”

“This isn’t right, sir.”

“It’s not open for debate, Captain. Loki isn’t a high-value prisoner on his own but it’s known that he’s Thor’s brother and that if Loki’s in danger, Thor will fight to get him out of it. The word isn’t necessarily out yet that Thor might have the entire Avengers team behind him; as far as the two morons we’ve got here know, the Avengers still consider Loki an enemy. As long as you keep him hidden for now, nobody needs to know otherwise. So they’ll have Loki, and they’ll set a trap for Thor… but Thor’s going to have back-up. A lot of it. And if everything goes well, we pull the bait out alive too.”

“And if he ends up dead?”

Fury’s one good eye fixed on him with intent focus. “You’re pretty concerned about Loki all of a sudden.”

“He hasn’t done anything since he’s been here to present himself as a threat. I don’t like putting anyone’s life in danger…”

“If he doesn’t do this, his life is in danger, and from people I don’t have any power over,” Fury said. “He’s going to have to give me something to go on if I’m going to convince them to let him stay.”

Steve nodded slowly. He didn’t know exactly who was higher than Fury on the decision-making ladder, but he understood that there were only so many options the director had. 

“You have a plan for how we’re going to do this?”

“Our buddies here have one of the tracking devices that they use, the same as the one you guys took out of Loki already. Apparently, according to the standard rules of bounty hunting, you can’t claim a target indefinitely. Once you’ve tagged them, your claim only lasts a certain amount of time, and then the chip starts broadcasting that the target is open for business again. It’s a rule they apparently came up with together to keep some asshole from going all over the galaxy and just tagging everyone with a bounty on them and then never finishing the job. We’re going to alter the chip so that its time limit is up, so when we put it on Loki, it’s going to pop up on the other hunters’ screen as a target that’s just become available. They come for him, find out he’s the lowest bounty and that Asgard only wants him as a prisoner and Thanos doesn’t really want him for much, but that they can use him to try to lure in the big prize.”

“When do we start?”

“The chip will be ready tomorrow. I’ll have it sent to the tower and Stark can plant it somewhere under Loki’s skin and activate it.”

“How long after that until they come looking for him?”

“Probably a few days. But we can’t have them coming to the tower… and they won’t find him there anyway. It’s too well shielded for the signal to get out. He’s going to have to go out alone and make himself visible. Wherever he was staying before you guys found him, he should go and spend some time there. Once he’s implanted, he can’t be seen anywhere near any of you guys until this is over.”

Steve forced down the twisting, sick feeling in his stomach. 

“Yes, sir. And once they have Loki?”

“See what they do. Take it from there. That’s all I can tell you. Let the rest of the team know what’s going on. Make sure Loki understands what his choices are here.”

“I will, sir.”

“I know. That’s why I put you in charge. Don’t make me regret it.”

 

 

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	36. Chapter 36

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Just because Fury has given orders doesn't mean the team intends to follow them. And just because Captain America would never do anything like bend somebody over the table in Tony's conference room doesn't mean... wait. Never mind. 
> 
> .  
> .  
> .

It took some time (and an order of pizza and six different kinds of chicken wings) to lure the entire team out of their various locations and into the living room, and even more time before Steve managed to drag them into the conference room, leaving Loki to finish sampling the various dinner items. 

“Fury has orders for us,” he said, as they meandered to their chairs. 

“Orders… like, work?” Tony asked.

“Yes, work,” Steve said. “I’m not going over this fourteen times, so pay attention.”

He explained the conversation he’d had with Fury. 

“Any questions?”

“Yeah. What was that last part?” Tony asked. 

Bruce punched him. Steve rolled his eyes. “This is serious. You understand what he wants us to do, right?”

“Yeah, I do,” Tony said. “He wants us to stick a chip in Loki, throw him out of the tower, wait for a bunch of professional killers to pick him up, and then hope they feel like negotiating and assume they won’t torture or kill him in the mean time.”

“That’s pretty much it,” Steve said. “If you’d like, I’ll have you all leave and I’ll talk to each of you individually if you don’t want to discuss your thoughts on this in front of…”

“There’s nothing to discuss,” Tony said. “We’re not doing it.”

Steve glanced around the table, but no one said a word to contradict Tony’s statement. 

“That’s not us,” Natasha said, after a moment. “It might have been me, once. Either the killer or the bait, depending on the day. But that’s not us.”

“I’m not going to be part of any plan that puts someone in a position to be hurt or killed just for the sake of trying to lure out somebody more interesting,” Bruce said. 

Thor shook his head. “I do not care how much trouble my brother has caused. He will not be used as a sacrifice. I will present myself to these bounty hunters before I allow them to…”

“We’re not doing that either,” Steve said. 

“But if Loki doesn’t help us, no asylum for him,” Natasha said. 

“He can still help,” Steve said. “He has a very unique and specific skill set. You remember when we talked to him when he first got here… the things he told us they couldn’t take away because they were part of his nature?”

She smiled. “That could be a very useful skill set.”

“Is this something we could recruit some help from Asgard for, since they’re the ones Thanos is going to target first?” Bruce asked. 

Thor glanced at Clint. 

“You should tell them, little Hawk.”

“Loki didn’t give me permission to talk about…”

“He never will. But the team must understand why we can take no action that would risk putting Loki back in our father’s hands, at any cost.”

Clint nodded slowly, and although there was no emotion in his voice as he told them about the desolate, windowless room and the shelves full of horrible things layered with old blood, he could see the others shuddering, and when he touched his thumb and forefinger together to demonstrate the size of the smallest set of handcuffs, Thor made a small, choked sound and Natasha raised her hand. 

“Stop, Clint. Please.”

“We get the idea,” Tony said. “And no, we’re not sending him back into that either. Did you guys know this was what Asgard did with…”

“That is not how Asgard treats all its prisoners,” Thor muttered. “Loki was special. When my father realized what he had brought back, he knew the only way to keep Loki from revealing his true nature was to break him of it.”

“You can’t break someone enough to take away who they really are,” Clint said. “You might make them forget, but you can’t kill it. It’s always there.”

“It was never my father’s right or duty to turn Loki into something he was not,” Thor said. “But perhaps you understand now, as I did when I saw this place only days ago, why he can never have Loki back.”

“We don’t use people as bait. And we don’t hand them over to their abusers,” Tony said. “I think those are pretty straight-up rules. Anyone disagree?”

Steve might have disagreed with Tony playing team leader, except that Tony was already making his point for him, and no one could accuse Tony of having any particular fondness for Loki. 

“I agree,” he said. “That’s not us. And we’re not going to do it. I have some other ideas. They might be dangerous. Someone might get hurt. But at least everyone involved has a fighting chance and no one’s getting handed over like a prize at a carnival. Anyone got a problem with that?”

“Putting ourselves in situations where we might get hurt is part of the job,” Natasha said. “As long as we’re going to put up a real fight and not just dangle someone out there as bait.”

“We’re going to have to bait them,” Steve said. “Fury’s going to be tracking that chip. The thing is, they’re going to be prepared for it to be Loki, and for him to be alone.”

“They will have spells and drugs to neutralize his magic,” Thor said. “They will be prepared to outnumber him and render him defenseless.”

“Well, that’s the thing about fishing,” Steve said. “Sometimes the bait turns out to be a little more than the fish was bargaining for.”

Tony grinned. “This plan sounds deceitful and dangerous. I like it.”

“We may catch some heat for disobeying orders…”

Clint shrugged. “Most of us just ignore that. Except Tony… he’s keeping score.”

“Okay, then. Can you guys step out and send Loki in? I want to make sure he understands everything that’s going on and what the consequences might be.”

“You just want to do stuff to him on my conference table,” Tony muttered. 

Steve rolled his eyes. “No, I do not. That’s disgusting. And… probably not comfortable. Just tell him to come in here, please.”

 

 

 

 

Loki studied the empty chairs, then sat down on the table, stretched out his legs, and opened his hands expectantly. 

“Well? What is the verdict? Has the team decided I should leave? Or that they should hand me back over to what Asgard calls justice? I’m sure father would be delighted to have me back. Or to their scientists to study? Perhaps they’d like to use me for some kind of experiment.”

Steve leaned back in his chair. Eventually, Loki fell silent and looked over at him. 

“If you’re not answering me, does that mean it’s bad?”

“No. It means you should stop pretending you don’t care. And you should sit in a chair like a normal person because sitting on the table is for three-year-olds.”

Loki sighed and slid into a chair. “Yes, Captain.”

“Don’t do that.”

“Then stop playing with me.”

“I’m not playing with you. I’m waiting for you to act like a reasonable person so I can talk to you like one.”

Loki rolled his eyes. “Very well. Here I am, entirely reasonable and prepared for a proper discussion. What is the fate your team has decided for me?”

“Fury’s orders are for us to use you as bait and allow you to be captured by bounty hunters hoping they’ll try to use you as a lure for Thor. If you survive, you get to stay.”

“Any bounty hunter worth the title would realize that Thor would have too much support behind him, if they know…”

“You’d be thrown out of the tower,” Steve said. “We would make it look like we still considered you an enemy and wouldn’t support Thor if he came after you.”

“I see,” Loki said quietly. “So those are Fury’s orders. And the team will follow them.”

Steve smiled. “I don’t know if you’ve realized this yet, but we’re not really a follow-orders type of team, generally.”

Loki looked up, his face expressionless, but there was something in the bright green eyes balancing between wariness and hope. 

“What does that mean?”

“We have a different plan. We still need your help. And we need to know we can trust you, because if we try this, and you disappear or turn on us, some of us are going to get killed, and that’s not acceptable. If you help us, and if we can trust you, and if we’re lucky, we all get out alive and we send a message that whatever the bounty is that Thanos promised them, it’s not worth it.”

“Why would you think you could trust me?”

“I’m asking you if we can trust you,” Steve said. 

“I could lie.”

“Have you lied to me yet?”

Loki lowered his eyes. “Once.”

Steve frowned, leaning forward. “When?”

“When I said that you had done a satisfactory job of providing me with pleasure…”

Steve’s face turned red even remembering the conversation, much less the context. 

“That was a lie?”

“I should have told you the truth, but…”

“Why? What’s the truth?”

“That there has never been anyone who cared to please me before, and that ‘satisfactory’ utterly failed to describe what you did…”

Steve rubbed his face. “Ummm… thank you? Okay. That’s not really a lie… you just brought that up to embarrass me and mess with my head while I was trying to talk about strategy, didn’t you?”

“Perhaps.”

“Are you avoiding the question?”

“If you give me a role to fight beside your team and earn my right to be here, instead of tossing me out as bait and seeing if I survive, I swear on what honor I have and whatever trust we have between us, small as it might be, that I will fight as a member of your team and to the best of my ability. I owe these bounty hunters nothing. I owe Asgard nothing. I owe the Earth nothing. I owe your team something, because they have given me something.”

“What’s that?”

“A chance to prove myself. A chance to be something other than Loki the Deceiver.”

“Actually… I sort of still need you to be Loki the Deceiver. It’s part of the plan.”

Loki grinned. “I would be delighted. But there was something else we were discussing…”

“What?”

“You know what.”

Steve flushed. “This is the conference room.”

“Is it not secure, if you wish it to be?”

“Captain,” JARVIS said, making Steve’s face even redder, “the conference room has the highest level of security in the building next to the labs and Agent Romanov’s private quarters.”

“Is he always listening?” Loki asked. 

“Unless you tell him not to,” Steve said. 

Loki leaned back in his chair, letting his hair fall over his face, and looked at Steve expectantly. 

“Ummm… JARVIS?”

“Captain?”

“Can you shut off… all the recording stuff in this room? Until we’re… done… talking? About… plans? I don’t want…”

“Shutting off audio and video recording, Captain. It will automatically restart when you leave the room.”

Steve exhaled. “That was easy.”

“Removing these Midgardian clothes is equally easy,” Loki said. “They are practically made to come off.”

Steve’s mouth had gone dry, and the words that came out of it couldn’t possibly have come out of his brain. 

“Take them off.”

“Oh, no. You come over here and do that.”

So he did. 

 

 

 

 

“Told you they were fucking,” Clint said. 

Natasha glared at him. “Watch TV and be quiet.”

“Well, they did turn off the recording,” Tony said. 

“Probably because Steve wanted Loki to be able to speak without worrying about all of us listening,” she said. 

“You don’t even believe that,” Bruce said. “You’re trying not to giggle.”

“I do not giggle. I kill people.”

“You know they’re fucking,” Tony said. 

Thor grinned. “Perhaps Loki is teaching Captain Steve to be less concerned with…”

“As long as they clean the table afterwards,” Clint muttered. 

“Why? You and I forgot that one time…” Tony said.

Clint glared at him. “We still had most of our clothes on.”

“Where was I?” Bruce demanded. 

“Sleeping,” Tony said. “You miss a lot with this whole regular sleep schedule thing you have going on.”

“Where did they get the energy to do it again when that’s what they spent all day doing?” Bruce asked. 

Thor chuckled. “My brother is a god, and Captain Steve is an enhanced human. I’m sure they have sufficient stamina.”

Natasha shook her head. “Just… don’t say anything when they come out.”

“Why not? We do it to everybody else?” Tony asked. 

She looked over at him with a clenched jaw. “Because this is my project and I am managing it carefully for a reason and if you fuck it up I will personally remove parts of your anatomy to make sure you understand how displeased I am.”

“Okay. Good reason. What are we watching, anyway? It’s obviously much more interesting than any possible Captain America-fucking-Loki-over-my-conference-table that might be going on.”

Bruce rolled his eyes. “You even suck at pretending to behave.”

“Yeah, well… I try.”

“No, you don’t.”

“I try a little bit.”

“Nope.”

“Occasionally?”

“No.”

“Fine. I’m an unrepentant pain the ass.”

Bruce gave him a thumbs-up. “Correct answer.”

“And you love it.”

“Shut up, Tony.”

 

 

 

 

At some point taking clothes off had become an annoyance, especially since Loki seemed to very much like grabbing at Steve’s jeans and t-shirt, and Steve had gotten as far as dragging the too-big pants Loki had borrowed from his room off of him, but had decided that the dark gray shirt was too pretty a contrast against the white skin above and below it, so he left it on. And as a bonus, the fabric made it easier to slide Loki backwards across the slick surface of the table until he was stretched out on it with his legs wrapped around Steve’s waist. 

“Didn’t you say Stark had useful supplies hidden everywhere?” Loki asked. 

Steve looked around. “I know he has them in here. I’ve seen him sneak Clint and Bruce in here before.”

“My, but he is a busy boy. If you were Tony Stark, where would you keep such an essential item?”

“Where I could get to it easily,” Steve said, feeling around the edge of the table near the chair where Tony usually sat. After a moment, his fingers found a hidden latch, and a drawer popped open. Steve raised his eyebrows. 

“There’s some… interesting stuff in here.”

“Like what?” Loki asked, starting to sit up, but Steve pressed him back down. 

“Stay there. You look too good like that.”

“You’re very visual,” Loki murmured. “You like your pretty pictures.”

“I was going to be an artist,” Steve said, rubbing his slippery fingers together. “I like things that look…”

“Pretty.”

“Unique,” Steve said. “Special. Like… something ordinary in a special moment. Or how black your hair is and how white your skin is and how they just make this line across your face that you could just draw like that… one charcoal pencil stroke to capture the whole contrast…”

“You standing above me with your pants unzipped and your face flushed like that is a very pretty picture,” Loki said. “I’m not… I meant that.”

“Oh. I… thank you.”

Before Steve could say anything, Loki grinned and rolled onto his chest, and part of Steve’s brain was preparing to say something about how he wanted to be able to see Loki’s face, but the other part was completely short-circuited by the new and almost as pretty picture of Loki’s ass and the outstretched muscles of his lower back disappearing into his shirt and his hands spread open on the table. He pressed his fingers in, surprised at the lack of resistance. 

“You’re so…”

“Well, we were rather busy earlier,” Loki murmured, shifting his hips back against Steve’s hand. “I am more than ready.”

“I don’t want to hurt you…”

“Will you stop that?”

Fine, then, Steve thought, and took just one moment to enjoy the way his fingers made indentations in the pale skin over Loki’s hips before he pushed in, feeling Loki’s body take him easily, then tighten around him so deliberately that he knew there had to be a smirk on that pretty face. Dazed for a moment, he slumped forward, and Loki reached over his shoulder and grabbed for Steve’s shirt, pulling him down until Steve was bent over him, his face against Loki’s shoulder, black hair against his cheek. 

“You do know that fucking me very, very hard won’t hurt me,” Loki murmured. 

Steve couldn’t even manage to put together an answer to that, but he drew back and slammed in hard just to see if it was true. Loki just exhaled and pressed back against him, murmuring his approval, so he did it again, and again, until they found a hard rhythm that rocked the sturdy table and left Steve’s fingerprints bruised into Loki’s skin. Half-lost in the motion, Steve’s hand shot out and grabbed a handful of sleek dark hair and gripped it hard. Loki hummed his approval and arched up, baring his neck for Steve to bury his mouth against it as his hips jerked, lost their rhythm, and he slumped against Loki’s back, hand still wrapped in his hair. 

“This would be a very pretty picture,” Loki said contentedly. 

Steve braced his hands on the table and forced himself somewhat upright. “I didn’t… what about you?”

Loki rested his cheek against the table and grinned broadly. “I am quite well. Someone will have to give this table a thorough cleaning, though, as I don’t expect that Stark wants to find my…”

“Hush,” Steve muttered, drawing back and pulling Loki up so he could turn him around and kiss him, surprised at how eagerly and firmly Loki kissed him back after having become used to Natasha’s restrained closed-mouth pecks in response to his attempts. He was pretty sure she didn’t kiss Clint that way, but he hadn’t complained. She’d made the rules clear. He wasn’t sure Loki had any rules but he didn’t seem to have broken any of them yet.

“I’ll go get the cleaning wipes out of the cabinet in the hall,” Steve said. “Which means, of course, that everyone will harass me about what I need them for.”

“Sir,” JARVIS said politely, “you do realize that there is another door that opens out into the rear hallway and allows entrance and exit without being seen from the living area?”

“There is? Why didn’t you tell me that before?”

“You didn’t ask. I believe Mr. Stark and Agent Romanov are the only ones who use it, although I suspect Agent Barton has discovered it at some point.”

“Where…”

“Push the panel to the left of the projector screen.”

“Thank you, JARVIS.”

“I suppose I’m expected to put my clothes back on,” Loki said, sighing dramatically. 

“Unless you want to walk out there and announce that you’re going to sign up for the plan while you don’t have any pants on.”

“That might distract from the message,” Loki mused. “Very well. Pants it is, then.”

“Besides,” Steve said, feeling the familiar red color flood his cheeks. “I like being the only one who knows what you look like with no clothes on. I mean, I know Clint saw…”

Loki lowered his eyes. “That was different. He saw what I wanted him to see… and some things I didn’t want him to see… but he didn’t see this.”

Steve smiled. “Good. I like seeing this.”

“And you know who I am, and you know what I do, and yet you continue to believe in spite of all reasonable evidence and in spite of all logic that this is real.”

“Till you show me it’s not.”

“When I show you it’s not, it might be with a knife in your back. Don’t you know that?”

“Risk I’m willing to take,” Steve said. “Let’s get this mess cleaned up and then I’ll let you go tell the rest of the team that there’s a plan and you’re in it. I think they’ll be glad to hear it.”

“They must be as gullible as you.”

“We trusted each other when we had no reason to and didn’t like it. And it kept us alive.”

“Hmmm. That is a valid point.”

 

 

 

 

The chip arrived the next morning, delivered by a private messenger in a small cardboard box. Bruce took it to the lab, where the rest of the team was waiting, unpacked it, and set it down on the table. It was barely visible inside the clear plastic tube, just a speck. 

“You guys can actually modify that?” Clint asked. 

Tony nodded. “I’ve got the magnifying equipment and the micro-tools to work on things that small. It’s all just a matter of scale. It shouldn’t be too hard to figure out the timer mechanism and reset it to zero.”

Steve nodded. “You realize that once that chip is implanted, the clock starts ticking, and these bounty hunters are coming.”

“We’re ready,” Natasha said. “We know the plan.”

“Right. Everybody can find the hotel and room where Loki is staying? Everybody knows what to expect? We can’t have any slip-ups or…”

“We’ve got this,” Clint said. “This is what we do. Well, minus the magic and the demigods and all that stuff.”

Thor grinned and spun his hammer. “I am ready. I will not fail.”

“Just keep your mouth shut,” Clint muttered. 

Thor looked hurt. “I can play my role as well as anyone.”

“You’re a shitty liar.”

“Well, he’s going to have to be a really good one when this all starts to go down,” Steve said. “I know he can. Everybody can do this. Just think and be careful and don’t do anything to give up the plan until it’s time. Loki? You ready to do this?”

Loki nodded. “I am.”

“And you know if you turn on us when this happens, at least one of the people you’re standing here looking at is probably going to die.”

“I know this.”  
“And?”  
“And we waste time talking while there are enemies who need to die,” Loki said, grinning.

“I’m with him,” Tony said. “Give me the chip. We’ll have it implanted within a couple of hours, and then you can let Fury know that the bait is out.”

“Fury’s not a big fan of being lied to,” Clint said absently, playing with an arrow. 

“We’re not lying to him. We’re just not involving him in the details of the plan until he needs to know,” Steve said. 

“Which will be when it’s over,” Natasha added. “So no matter who he calls and leans on, stick with the story and don’t fuck it up. Especially you, Thor.”

He raised his hands. “Why especially me?”

“Because you really are an appallingly bad liar and Fury knows it and he’s going to work you as hard as he can if he thinks we’re playing him. So whatever you do, no matter what happens, do not get on the phone with him. Period. At all. JARVIS?”

“Yes, ma’am. Reroute all attempts by Director Fury to contact Thor and redirect them to Mr. Stark’s voicemail.”

“Perfect.”

Tony grabbed the little plastic tube. “Come on, Bruce. Let’s get this thing going.”

 

 

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	37. Chapter 37

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Time to fight some bounty hunters... although the plan isn't quite the one Fury had in mind. Oh, well. As long as everything works out right. Although that's really expecting an awful lot, considering who we're talking about. Especially since it appears the bounty hunters may have an unexpected ally...  
> .  
> .  
> .

The call came just after dawn, but Steve had been stationed on the rooftop overlooking the target for hours. 

“Sir, the bounty hunters have initiated contact,” JARVIS said. “The name they are using to refer to their group has no translation in any human language but could be vaguely interpreted as ‘Those Who Forcefully Take Things’. Shall I transfer the communication to your phone?”

“Yeah. I thought there was going to be a background that would make it look like I was in the conference room.”

“There will, Captain. It will be added digitally.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“Not at all. Communication transferring in three… two… one…”

The screen on his phone flashed, and he found himself looking at a pair of seemingly identical gray-skinned brutes in plate metal armor, both with sharp black eyes and ugly-looking black weapons over their shoulders. Dwarfed by their size but still smug and confident was a little blue female, almost human-looking but for the strange patterns mottled across her skin and the pair of wings that were half-folded behind her shoulders as she grinned at him. 

“Greetings. You are Captain Rogers, leader of the Avengers?”

“I am. And you are…”

“My name is not important.”

“It helps with negotiations.”

“And what do you suppose you are negotiating for?”

“I don’t know. You called us.”

“Mmm-hmm. ‘Us’. Where is the rest of your team, Captain?”

Steve feigned unease. “Busy.”

She chuckled. “Well, I’m sure they’re not out looking for this sorry creature that we hauled out of his filthy hole yesterday…”

One of the gray enforcers dragged a bound and weary-looking Loki into view. Steve could see the runic markings on the cuffs that bound his wrists and on the heavy collar around his neck; Thor had explained such markings were used by Asgard’s enemies to suppress and subdue the strength and magical abilities of prisoners. 

“Loki’s not ours,” Steve said. “Do whatever you want with him.”

“No… but this one is yours, correct?”

The other enforcer hauled a kicking, swearing, bruised Clint in front of the camera. 

“We found him monitoring the trickster’s whereabouts,” the bounty hunter said. “I’m quite certain he is one of yours.”

“What are you going to do with him?” Steve demanded. He didn’t really care about the answer, but he needed more time. 

“We’d like to trade him for someone of higher value,” she said. “And you know who that is. Deliver Thor to us, properly restrained, and we’ll give you back your archer.”

“Fine. Look. We’ll just need some time to get the equipment and…”

A voice spoke in the tiny headset tucked inside his ear.

“It’s a go,” Tony said. “Location confirmed. “See that big abandoned factory? They’re in the rear section, to the northwest. Natasha counts nine of them.”

Steve nodded and focused his attention back on the screen. 

“Okay, here’s the deal.”

Her smile vanished. “There is no deal.”

“The deal is, we’re not handing Thor over to you and we’re coming to get our archer and we’re coming to get Loki too and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.”

She stared back at him for a moment, and he held his breath. If she didn’t do what they’d assumed she would do…

She turned and plunged a knife into Clint’s stomach. He gasped, eyes widening as his legs went out from under him.

“There. Now see if you can get here in time to save him…”

Her words trailed off as she realized that suddenly there was a very loud roar from behind her, and suddenly both of her enforcers had vanished, and there was an enormous, furious, flashing-eyed green monster ripping off the remnants of the Asgardian restraints. 

“Excellent,” Clint said cheerfully, except the voice wasn’t his own, and when he popped back to his feet, there was no wound in his stomach, and he also didn’t look anything like Clint anymore. Steve grinned. 

“Stay out of the Hulk’s way, Loki. My ETA is three minutes. Stark’s is…”

“Right fucking now,” Tony’s voice said through the headset, and at the same time the ceiling of the building exploded, raining down sheet metal and beams, which Loki easily dodged and which merely served to annoy the Hulk further; he was already off hunting the gray enforcer whose arms he hadn’t already ripped off. 

“There’s still six unaccounted for,” Steve said, leaping for the next building. 

“We’re flushing them out,” Clint said. “Tasha shot one in the head and the other one got an explosive-tipped arrow to the groin.”

“You did that on purpose.”

“Maybe.”

“Stay safe.”

 

 

 

Steve darted into the building, finding himself surrounded by dust and debris. It appeared that Tony was making liberal use of his explosive charges, which was fine, since they wouldn’t hurt Loki or the Hulk and the two assassins were still in hiding. 

“Clint! What’s the count?”

“Hulk found the other gray guy. Those were her two bodyguards. He tore one of them apart when he turned and he hunted the other one down and smashed it with a beam. He’s looking for more now but for some reason they seem to be avoiding him. Loki dropped a big piece of machinery on one of them. I took out the one I told you about and Tasha took one and she’s tracking another one. So that’s five down, one Tasha has in her sights, and three unaccounted for.”

“Does that include the leader?”

“The little blue thing with wings? We don’t know where she went.”

“Yeah, well… she didn’t get to lead this crew for nothing. Find her. She’s smart and she’s hiding, and since she can presumably fly, she’s probably somewhere high up, which makes this one all yours.”

“On it, Captain.”

Tony zoomed by overhead, more for entertainment than because he was actually going anywhere. 

“I’m trying to track them by heat signature but there’s a lot of airborne debris that’s obscuring the signals…”

“Which you had nothing to do with.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“Where’s the Hulk?”

A terrified scream that quickly became an agonized shriek and then loud pounding and then silence came from the far end of the building. 

“There’s the Hulk,” Clint said. “And that makes two unaccounted for and seven down… the one Natasha was tracking had a little accident with something very sharp and he’s not going to be bothering us anymore.”

“The blue one with wings…”

“Still on the loose. Also a weird-looking thing with insect legs… hang on.”

Steve waited. 

“Okay. Now it’s got insect legs and an acid arrow eating through its exoskeleton. It’s not going very far. You want to finish it off while I go look for the princess?”

“Glad to.”

He found the scuttling insectoid creature and dispatched it with a blow, although it seemed more like putting it out of its misery, considering the hole Clint’s arrow had dissolved in its armored abdomen. 

“Okay, team. The leader’s on the loose and Tony would have seen her if she’d tried to go up through the roof. Assume she’s armed and dangerous and don’t mess around.”

He crept between the machines and piles of debris, eyes alert for any movement. He could hear the Hulk tearing things apart somewhere, and he could track Tony by the sounds of the suit as he scanned overhead, but no one spoke. 

 

 

 

 

Clint crouched low, unmoving. He’d seen the flash of the edge of a wing and followed it. Now she was perched on a beam in a darkened corner above the chaos, teeth bared, claws digging into the metal. With practiced motions that were almost like breathing, his fingers found an arrow and slid it to his bow, and his body locked into position as he drew back the string.   
In the instant before he could release the arrow, the creature shrieked and dove from her perch. Clint swore and dove after her, grabbing for beams on the way down to slow his fall. He hit the ground hard and rolling, and when he propped himself up, gasping for breath, he realized that the creature was backed into a corner again, this time by Loki. 

“Don’t be an idiot,” she hissed. “They’re not here to help you.”

“Oh, and I suppose you are?” he asked. 

“I can. Help me. You have magic. Make me look like their leader. Take on one of their roles. We can create enough confusion to end them. I was prepared to pay my team out of whatever bounty I collected… help me, and you and I will share it.”

Loki rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Hmm. That is an interesting proposition.”

Clint had managed to get another arrow ready, but Loki kept moving back and forth in front of the target, and if she realized Clint had a shot on her, she’d be gone again. 

“There’s no time to play,” she said, reaching for something on her belt. “We can take them all… they took my team by surprise. We’ll take them by trickery.”

Loki smiled at her, then glanced over his shoulder at Clint and stepped aside. 

“Thank you, but no.”

The arrow buried itself in her chest and the scream that began in her throat became a gasp. Clint realized her hand was still on the thing on her belt, and he shouted Loki’s name, but at the same time she had flung her arm out, and the thing uncoiled like an impossibly long whip, singing through the air and wrapping itself around Loki’s body. For a moment he seemed to shrug it off, but Clint could see confusion and then pain and then fear flash across his face as the coils tightened, digging in, entwined around his body from shoulders to knees. As he slumped to the ground, Clint watched in horror as the end the creature had been holding, which had once been the handle, slowly raised itself up from the ground, now studying its captive with glowing red jeweled eyes before it opened its mouth and buried its metallic fangs deep into the skin at the base of Loki’s neck. 

“Shit!” Clint shouted. “Need the team… everybody… last target is down but she did… something to Loki… I don’t know what…”

He crouched beside the unmoving figure and tried to pry the mechanical snake’s head free, but it was locked in place. The coils didn’t budge either, and to his alarm there were streaks of blood appearing against the scaled metal surface. 

“Guys? Hurry up.”

 

 

 

 

Tony was the first to arrive, but when the suit’s powerful hydraulics couldn’t budge the thing by one inch, there didn’t seem to be much point in anyone else trying. 

“Is the Hulk still loose?” Natasha asked. “Maybe he could…”

Thor shook his head. “This can only be removed by its maker.”

“And that is…” Tony asked. 

“Odin,” Thor muttered, reaching down to feel Loki’s pulse, strong but fast under the pale skin. “This is a weapon of Asgard, and one only Odin and a few others would ever be permitted to wield. It is intended to keep a prisoner alive but incapacitated for a short time, perhaps while his troops negotiated for his life. If not removed, it will kill him.”

“Where the hell did these guys get it?” Clint demanded. “Thanos shouldn’t have…”

“Thanos never had access to such a device. Nor could he have bound it to that bounty hunter to enable her to use it,” Thor said. “This is powerful magic.”

“So was she supposed to use that on Thor?”

“I doubt it,” Natasha said. “If this is as dangerous as Thor says, and there’s a chance someone might not get him to Odin to get it off in time… Odin gave this to her. And I don’t think he wanted it used on Thor. He doesn’t have to do this to get Thor to come back. He wanted Loki.”

Thor sighed and looked at the ground. “My father has long feared Loki would side with enemies of Asgard and bring Ragnarok upon us. Perhaps he believed Thanos was that enemy.”

“There was a special bounty on him,” Clint muttered. “Not from Thanos. From Odin. And we handed him over on a plate, and now if we can’t get this thing off him…”

“I can take him to Asgard,” Thor said. 

“So he’ll be alive, but a prisoner,” Natasha said. 

“And subjected to whatever tortures are deemed necessary,” Thor confirmed grimly. 

“That’s not an option,” Steve said. “We don’t deliver gift-wrapped prisoners for their torture sessions. Thor, can you carry him? We need to get back to the tower. Tony, I need you back there as fast as possible to start working on this thing. Clint…”

“I’ll go calm the Other Guy down and get Bruce back to the tower,” he said. “Sounds like he’s settling down already.”

Steve nodded. “Good. Natasha? You want to check the bodies and take anything useful off them, disable any communications devices, all of that?”

“On it, Captain.”

Thor lifted Loki, shifting the awkward weight of the metal coils. “Captain… do you think Fury knew about this?”

Steve shook his head. “Fury does what he has to do, but Asgard is an ally and Loki is a prisoner of war. If they wanted Loki turned over to them and had taken legitimate action to request that he be sent back, Fury would have honored that. Odin didn’t want anyone to know how much he wanted Loki back because he didn’t want anyone to know…”

“No. He would not want anyone to know,” Thor said. “I will meet you at the tower. Hopefully Tony’s science is more powerful than Asgard’s magic.”

 

 

 

 

Tony tossed his cutting torch to the ground and kicked it. “Fuck it. It’s not working.”

Natasha glanced up at Thor, who stood at the head of the lab table, holding Loki in place as the others tried to pry, cut, break, or otherwise make some dent in the metal coils wrapped around him. 

“How is he?”

“It grows tighter. He can barely breathe.”

“I don’t have anything else,” Tony said, rubbing his forehead. “Bruce?”

“I’m trying,” he muttered, sitting at his desk with his head in his hands. “We’ve got chemicals that should eat through any kind of metal and they’re not even tarnishing this stuff.”

“It is protected by Odin’s magic,” Thor said. 

“Fuck this stuff about magic,” Tony growled. “There’s got to be a way out of this. We can’t just let him die right here in my lab. I mean, he could have turned on us as soon as he was captured and sold us out to those bounty hunters. Or he could have run for it as soon as the shit hit the fan.”

“If he hadn’t been distracting my target long enough for me to get a shot at her, she’d never have gotten close enough to do this,” Clint said. “He fought on our side.”

Steve crossed his arms. “So we fight for him. Is there any chance Fury can try to put some diplomatic pressure on Odin to…”

Thor shook his head. “As long as he lives and breathes Odin will never admit to having placed such a powerful device in the hands of a common bounty hunter. He would much rather allow Loki to die than allow anyone to know the secrets he has kept.”

Steve didn’t even realize until he’d already done it that he was brushing strands of dark hair off Loki’s forehead. “There’s got to be something else. Does S.H.I.E.L.D. have any technology…”

“Everything they have is already in my lab and works better than their version,” Tony said.

Bruce looked up. “He’s not just being an asshole. It’s true.”

Natasha pressed her fingers to Loki’s throat. “His pulse is weaker. What is this thing doing to him?”

“The coils draw blood and life from the body,” Thor said, “and the poison prevents magic from healing it.”

“How long does he have?”

“Perhaps a few more hours,” Thor said. “Is there anything else you can try?”

“Well, we’re sure as hell not quitting,” Tony said, and headed off toward another part of the lab. 

Bruce slumped against the desk. “He doesn’t have anything. We don’t have anything. Nothing that undoes magic.”

“You got the Tesseract energy out of me,” Clint said. “That was magic.”

“We needed Loki to do that,” Natasha reminded him. “He did the magic.”

“So we need someone who can do magic…”

Thor shook his head. “This is not just any magic. Only the King of Asgard can undo it.”

All of them spun as the lab filled with a golden light. Clint and Natasha had heard that voice before and would never forget it, and Thor knew it as well as his own, but the others stared in bewilderment. 

“Only the king… or one the king has invested with the power to carry out his will in his absence,” the woman said, stepping out of the light and into the lab even as sparks of it still clung to her gown and her hair. 

“My Lady,” Natasha said, lowering her head. Clint bowed silently, and Thor dropped to one knee. 

“Mother. Please. Can you undo this?”

“If he has proved himself worthy,” she said, her face grave. “If I free him of this and he goes on to wreak the havoc my husband has always believed he would…”

“Your husband’s wrong,” Steve said. “We gave him every chance to turn on us. For profit, to save his own skin… just for fun, even. He never did. He’s had every chance to kill me. He didn’t. He’s had chances to kill Clint. He didn’t. He had a chance to turn Thor over to those bounty hunters and let Thanos turn him and use him as a weapon against Asgard, and honestly, I wouldn’t even have blamed him for that one… but he didn’t.”

Frigga nodded. “Very well. But he is in your keeping, my friends… and I was never here.”

“I didn’t see any glowing magical Asgardian queen,” Tony said. “Did you, Bruce?”

“Nope. Didn’t see a thing.”

She smiled and stepped toward the table, drawing a small knife from somewhere in her robes. She touched it to the coil that rested across Loki’s chest and drew it downward in a smooth, quick motion. It did not seem a deep enough cut to make any difference, but as they watched, the coils began to split and crumble where the blade had passed them. Immediately there were six pairs of hands pulling and yanking at the things, struggling to unwrap them. 

“What the hell is this?” Clint demanded. “Are these teeth?”

Thor nodded to the deep puncture wounds across Loki’s pale skin. “I told you it drained him.”

“Shit,” Tony muttered, pulling off another coil. “He’s lost a lot of blood.”

Natasha carefully took the mechanical snake’s head in her hands. The jaws now slid open, the fangs leaving bleeding gashes in the skin. 

“Thor?”  
Thor took the head, placed it in the palm of his hand, and used his hammer to grind it to a metallic powder. 

“Okay,” Bruce said, taking a breath. “He can breathe again, but he’s lost a lot of blood and he’s probably in shock and I don’t know how you give a transfusion to someone who isn’t human and…”

He turned to look to Frigga for answers, but she had vanished. 

“All right, then,” Tony said. “Guess this part is on us. Thor, you said once whatever that thing injected into him is out of his system, he’ll be able to use his magic to heal himself, right?”

“He should.”

“Okay. Then since we don’t happen to have any Frost Giants with a compatible blood type handy, we’re going to have to do what we can. And I have no idea what that is.”

Bruce shook his head, trying not to laugh. “We can give him fluids to combat shock, and we can make him comfortable and try to clean all those wounds so something doesn’t start infecting them before he can heal them.”

“What, we’re going to stitch them all up?” Tony asked. 

Natasha rolled her eyes. “You leave puncture wounds open to drain. Even I know that.”

“You’ve had enough of them,” Clint muttered.

She glanced at him and reached over to grab his hand. He squeezed her fingers and exhaled. 

“So, supportive care until whatever it injected him with wears off?” he asked. “How long will that take?”

“I don’t know,” Thor said. “I have never seen this device in use, much less seen anyone survive it. It is a magical poison and he will need to fight it with whatever power of his own he has left.”

“Can we help him?”

“We can let him know he’s not alone,” Steve said. “That would help give me a reason to fight, if it were me.”

Tony nodded. “Okay. So, let’s clean him up while Bruce gets an IV started and some fluids into him and then we’ll get him up to one of the guest rooms and…”

“My room will be fine,” Steve said. 

“Up to Steve’s room,” Tony transitioned seamlessly, “and get him settled in, and we’ll go from there. And if anyone knows what that’s going to involve, they’re welcome to say so, because technically, he could still wake up and kill us all.”

Natasha shrugged. “Technically, so could I. I could’ve been working for the Russians this whole time.”

“I could’ve still been brainwashed by Thanos and waiting for a chance to kill you all,” Clint said.

“If I told the Other Guy you were going to try to hurt us, he’d smash all your heads,” Bruce pointed out. “None of us are exactly one hundred percent safe to have around.”

“Steve is,” Tony said, pointing at him. 

Steve shook his head, smiling. “You wouldn’t say that if you knew how many times I’ve wanted to strangle the entire team on movie night. Enough talking. Let’s get to work.”

 

.  
.  
.


	38. Chapter 38

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the aftermath of their run-in with bounty hunters and their test of whether Loki can be trusted further than one can throw him (Thor's throws don't count), the team regroups to discuss the impact of the events, diplomatic relations with Asgard, and grilled cheese sandwiches.
> 
> .  
> .  
> .

“What have we got?” Natasha asked, leaning over Loki as Bruce finished taping down the IV line it had taken him forever to put in. 

“Well, apparently, he wasn’t kidding about being tougher than a human, because that needle really didn’t want to go through his skin,” Bruce said. “Considering that all that jabbing had to hurt a lot, I’d say that counts as not responding to painful stimuli. Some of that might be shock from blood loss, but I doubt it… I don’t know what his heart rate or blood pressure is supposed to be, but he doesn’t seem to be in distress… skin is cool and damp to the touch but not cold, and he’s always pale, so…”

“So probably enough blood loss that we’d expect his level of consciousness to possibly be altered, but he should still be awake if that was all,” she said. 

Bruce nodded. “Speaking from experience?”

“You learn to assess injuries in the field. Sometimes it’s another agent. Sometimes it’s not. When you’re out on a mission it’s you and your partner, and if one of you gets hurt, the other one needs to know how to assess and deal with it, because help may not be coming.”

“So you probably have just about as much medical knowledge as I do.”

“You spent all that time hiding out treating diseases and everyday injuries and things like that. I don’t have any expertise in anything except trauma. I could put in an IV line if I had to but chances are pretty good that if someone’s down in the field there’s no equipment like that available.”

Bruce reached up and adjusted the pillow under Loki’s head. “Well, if it’s not the blood loss, it must be whatever that thing injected into him, and we’ve got nothing to treat that. But from what Thor said, it wasn’t something that was supposed to kill him… it was supposed to keep him from being able to use his natural abilities to heal himself while the rest of the thing did its damage. Nasty kind of weapon… it would be sort of like tying someone down and giving them a hundred cuts and then injecting them with an anticoagulant so the cuts never stopped bleeding.”

“He’s not bleeding.”

“No, and those are pretty deep puncture wounds, but considering that he didn’t object very much to that bounty hunter stabbing him in the gut while he was pretending to be Clint…”

“And that he walked away bitching and complaining after I shot him…”

“I’m assuming that once whatever the thing injected wears off, he shouldn’t have any problem healing those.”

“And Thor has no idea how long that will take?”

Bruce shook his head. Natasha sighed. 

“Okay, then. That’s about all you can do. So let’s let Steve come in and babysit. Somebody’s got to put a call in to Fury to let him know what happened… he’s waiting, but I told him we had an injured team member and once they were stabilized I’d get to him.”

“Isn’t that Steve’s job?”

“Right now, Steve’s job is keeping an eye on Loki and NOT saying anything to Fury about why we changed the plan, because if Steve lets it slip that there was personal interest involved, it’s going to get ugly really fast. I can at least explain it in a way that makes it sound like it was a logical strategy… logical for us, at least. Knowing me and Clint like he does, having us completely change the plan and do something bizarre and unpredictable will sound pretty much like business as usual… as long as it comes from me and not Steve, and Steve knows it.”

“Fair enough,” Bruce said. “JARVIS, you can tell Steve he can come in now.”

Steve stalked in as soon as the door opened. “I don’t know why you locked me out of my own room.”

“Because I was kind of busy,” Bruce said, nodding to the IV and the clear liquid dripping from the bag hanging from a makeshift hook attached to one of the lamps above the bed. 

“Sorry,” Steve said, immediately apologetic. “I didn’t mean to…”

“No problem,” Bruce said. “He’s not awake, and he might not be for a while, but he seems to be stable… you can touch him or move him around if you think it’ll make him more comfortable. It won’t hurt him.”

Steve nodded and glanced at Natasha. “You’re going to deal with Fury?”

She waved her hand. “I do this all the time. Clint and I make him insane on a regular basis.”

“Thank you.”

“Have JARVIS get me or Bruce if you need anything. We told Thor to go away for a while because he’s busy guilt-tripping himself about not knowing what his asshole father has been up to all this time and he’s not helping, so don’t let him in until he’s at least done being obnoxiously sorry.”

“Will do.”

“Okay. You know where to find us. And if something happens…”

“You still think after all that he’s going to wake up and try to kill me?”

“Never know,” she said, heading for the door. “Better to be ready.”

 

 

 

 

Tony had just finished scolding one of the robots for missing a small dent in the suit with their repair machinery when Bruce wandered into the lab. 

“Having fun arguing with your machines?” 

“Not fun, exactly, but it is kind of therapeutic. You should try it some time.”

Bruce shrugged and slumped into a chair, letting it roll back until his legs were stretched out. Tony studied him for a moment. 

“You’re not in great shape, are you?”

“I’m fine.”

“Yeah. If even I can tell you’re not fine, you’re not fine.”

He grabbed a chair and rolled it to sit in front of Bruce, who sighed and stared up toward the ceiling. 

“Isn’t this supposed to be you pretending to be okay and me dealing with it?” he asked. 

Tony shrugged. “Usually. But we can play it both ways. You had the hardest job in this whole plan, and I don’t think anyone realized that.”

“It wasn’t that hard pretending to be Loki.”

“No. But you had to be out of the tower and away from us for two days, knowing those guys were going to come for you. And then they did…”

“And I knew I could let the Other Guy out and he’d probably kill all of them himself. I wasn’t afraid. If they’d come in and just tried to shoot me or something, they’d have had a lot more on their hands than they were ready for.”

“Yeah. But then you had to be a prisoner,” Tony said. “And because they had those Asgardian restraints on you, you had to be a prisoner with no ability to fight back. How much did they try to take advantage of that?”

“You know if they’d done anything to me, the Other Guy…”

“If they’d tried to physically hurt you, yeah. What did they do?”

Bruce ran a hand across his eyes. “I just… I’m used to being treated like a freak, like an animal, like a monster. But when they thought I was Loki, they treated him… like he was garbage. Like he was a waste of space. They said they knew Odin had disowned him and he only wanted him back to punish him for being an embarrassment. And that it was a good thing I’d been around so they could end up nabbing Clint while he was doing surveillance, because people might actually show up to save him. And the leader… the blue lady with wings… she kept whispering about how she knew what Odin really had planned for me and how pleased he was going to be to get his hands on me again and…”

“Psychotic abusive father thing hit a little too close to home?”

Bruce nodded. “Something like that. And knowing Loki’s been living it for… we don’t even know how long. And then we wonder why he wants to destroy things. I’m just lucky that the part of me that wants to destroy things at least isn’t capable of plotting world domination.”

Tony shrugged. “You could just invent a really fancy suit to hide in. It works for me. Or you could go Clint’s route and make a hobby out of proving to yourself how much abuse you can take. Or you could go with Natasha’s method and make a career out of pretending not to feel anything anymore until you start to believe it. Your way isn’t really any worse. Just involves a little more breaking stuff… but in between, you’re the most decent and normal one out of all of us.”

Bruce sat up. “We can’t let them send Loki back there. Even if it means he turns on us and we have to fight him again.”

“We’re not going to. We’re all part of the same fucked-up club here. None of us asked to be members. The support group kind of sucks sometimes. But it’s what we’ve got. And you need a break. You don’t look like you’ve slept since we turned you into Loki and sent you out.”

“I haven’t, really.”

Tony stood up and extended his hand. “Come on. I’ll even sleep too. I promise. I haven’t stopped watching the monitors to see where you were since you left, so I’m ready for a nap too.”

“The plan worked,” Bruce said, as Tony hauled him to his feet. “We did it. And Loki did his part. He could have screwed it up if he’d wanted to. He did everything we told him to do.”

“Which is good, because if he’d gone rogue and fucked it up, it would be a lot harder to convince Fury to let him stay.”

“Is Natasha going to tell Fury about…”

“If she does, it’ll be off the record and only Fury will know it. Asgard’s an important ally. But my guess will be she doesn’t tell him anything she doesn’t have to.”

 

 

 

 

“And you changed the plan WHY?” Fury demanded. 

Natasha leaned back in her chair. “Ours was better.”

“Yours was stupid and dangerous.”

“Tell me something I don’t already know.”

He glared at her. “How did you talk Captain Rogers into this?”

“He and I sat down and discussed your plan and realized that we had an opportunity to use Loki’s special skill set to tip the situation in our favor.”

“And how was that?”

“It turned out that these bounty hunters weren’t exactly expecting that on top of being picked off by your two best assassins, they were about to have a very pissed-off Hulk and a completely unrestrained demigod loose in their midst. They were a little surprised.”

“I can imagine they were,” Fury said. “And the plan worked… but you had no way of knowing Loki was going to hold up his end of the bargain. And if he hadn’t…”

“Why’d you give me a chance when Clint brought me back?” she interrupted. “Why not just have me killed? I know there were people who wanted that. I know what my record looks like. You knew I was dangerous. You knew what I’d done. You knew it could all be a trick. You knew I was capable of that. But you took me anyway.”

Fury sighed. “And you make me regret it occasionally.”

“You knew I was still a risk. But you handed me over to Clint and Coulson and you trusted their judgment and you let them decide.”

“They were both adamant that you were a valuable asset, regardless of the potential threat you posed to the agency. Clint trusted you as his partner and Coulson trusted the two of you as a team. And I trusted Coulson.”

“Do you trust me?” she asked. 

He smiled. “You’d tell me lies all day if I’d let you.”

“Do you trust my judgment?”

He looked at her evenly for a long moment. “On everything except your partner. You’ve got a big, dangerous blind spot when it comes to Barton, but I tolerate it because you two are just too damn good at what you do. But do I trust your judgment on Loki? That depends on what you’re basing that judgment on.”

“We found out things about Loki,” she said. “Not things he wanted us to know. And things that you probably don’t want to know, at least not officially, if you want to maintain diplomatic relations with Asgard, because at this point, I think even Thor’s ready to take his hammer to Odin’s head. I’m not going to say that Loki isn’t dangerous. I’m not going to say that I trust him. But I will say that based on what I know about him, and what I know about this team… he definitely belongs here.”

“Does he.”

“If you have a team of perfect superheroes who are all sane and normal and well-behaved and don’t have serious emotional problems, you haven’t told us about them,” she said. “We’re the other team. And that’s the one he belongs on. And I think as long as he feels like he belongs, he’ll play for our team, because he wants to belong somewhere.”

Fury nodded. “All right, then. I handed you over to Barton and Coulson. I’m handing Loki over to the team. He’s officially your responsibility.”

“Yessir.”

“And don’t think I don’t know when I’m being fed a line of bullshit, Agent Romanov.”

She gave him her sweetest smile. “I’m not feeding it to you. I’m just passing it along so you can send it up the food chain.”

He shook his head. “Sometimes I wonder why I thought that putting you people together was even remotely a good idea.”

“Because you’re a tactical genius?”

“Flattery will get you nowhere, Romanov. And what did you say earlier about an injured team member?”

“Clint jumped down from a roof support chasing his target and earned himself some pretty good bruises and probably some broken ribs. We wanted to make sure there wasn’t anything worse going on.”

“If Agent Barton comes out of a fight with nothing worse than broken ribs, he’s probably disappointed,” Fury muttered. “That will be all, Agent Romanov.”

“Thank you, sir.”

 

 

 

 

Thor’s door slid open to reveal him slumped in a chair, his face in his hands. Clint thought to himself that he would have to cause something unpleasant to happen to Natasha later for not warning him what she was sending him to deal with, but then Thor looked up at him with such plain and open distress in his usually cheerful blue eyes that Clint just sighed and motioned for the door to close behind him. 

“You didn’t know.”

“I should have,” Thor muttered. “I should have seen…”

“We’ve all seen how fast you guys heal,” Clint said. “You know Odin made sure nobody saw him until all the marks were gone. That’s kind of tricky with a human when it takes a bad bruise weeks to go away completely, but for you guys, it’s more like a couple of minutes. He didn’t want you to know. And you know he made damn sure Loki would be too afraid to tell anyone.”

“I’m his brother. I still should have…”

“Yeah. Guess what? My brother knew. My dad beat on him too. Not as bad as me, because Barney was bigger, but Barney wasn’t big enough to make him stop. He couldn’t have protected me. I know he wanted to.”

“My mother knew,” Thor said. “She had to know. Yet she allowed it…”

“My mother knew. She watched him do it. I don’t remember her ever trying to stop it. I’m sure if she had, he would have hit her too.”

“Frigga is powerful enough to challenge Odin, and he would never dare to lay a finger upon her.”

“No… but I’ll bet he had something else he could hold over her head to keep her quiet,” Clint said. “You know what it was, don’t you? Think about it. What did he threaten her with that would have made her so afraid she would stand back and let him torture she child she’d raised?”

Thor looked up. “The threat that if she spoke of it, or tried to stop it, he would reveal Loki’s true nature to all of Asgard, and Loki would be taken from her forever.”

Clint nodded. “Abusers are really good at making sure people stay quiet. They know how to make people afraid. If her choice was between knowing what he was doing to Loki and losing Loki forever…”

Thor nodded. 

“Natasha convinced Fury to let him stay,” Clint said.

Thor sat up. “What?”

“I don’t know what she told him. I’m sure the fact that he helped us pull of our plan and played like part of the team helped, but she had to have gone at him with more than just that. Whatever she told him… Loki’s staying. He’s our responsibility. He’s not going back to Asgard and if he wants to, he’s going to be one of us.”

Thor stared at him in disbelief. “Fury would allow this?”

“Fury sees potential where other people just see damage,” Clint said. “That’s where Natasha and I came from. Sometimes, the people who are the most loyal are the ones you gave a second chance to when no one else would. People don’t forget that.”

“He is to stay here? With us?” Thor repeated, still stunned. Then, just as suddenly, he slumped back in his chair. “It still does not remedy all the time he suffered while I played and fought and thought all was well.”

“I don’t think he expects you to fix that,” Clint said. “I mean, he can’t really fix all the times he tried to kill you.”

Thor smiled wryly. “That is true.”

Clint took a few steps closer, enough to let Thor smell the soap and dampness from the shower, knowing how much he liked it. “You know, talking isn’t really what we do best.”

“That is also true, my little Hawk. But I don’t think I’m strong enough today to be…”

“I don’t need that today.”

“Then what…”

“We can probably manage to actually just… you know… do normal things,” Clint said, grinning. 

Thor chuckled. “You make it sound so dull.”

“I’m going to like it when you fuck me even if you don’t put me under first. Actually, I think today I’d prefer that. I want to be all here. With you.”

Thor reached out and wrapped a hand in his t-shirt and pulled him closer. “I desire that.”

The need to forget and the eagerness to be lost for a while burned in Thor’s kisses and Clint returned it with willing heat, finding himself thinking in the back of his mind that something must have changed somewhere along the line if he was the one who could offer someone else the gift of respite from pain instead of seeking it. Then there wasn’t much room for thinking, because Thor had flipped him onto the bed and was busy stripping his clothes off, and Clint had decided that when one was being pinned down and undressed by a demigod who was preparing to fuck you to the edge of consciousness, the easiest and most enjoyable thing to do was just to go along with it. 

 

 

 

 

Natasha walked into Steve’s room to find him sitting by the window, looking out at the bright glow rising from the city and turning the night sky into a luminous haze. He looked up as she handed him a cup of coffee. 

“What’s this for? I thought coffee was for morning. Unless you’re Tony, and then it’s your primary source of nutrition.”

“Because you’re not going to sleep until Loki wakes up, so I thought you might want some coffee,” she said. “How is he?”

“Pretty much the same, I think. I checked and none of the wounds look inflamed and he doesn’t seem to be sick…”

“Thor said maybe he was just resting and giving the poison time to work itself out of his system. But since we don’t know how long that takes…”

Steve took the mug and set it on the table. “Thank you.”

She checked the IV bag hanging above the bed. “Still enough in here to last till Bruce wakes up and comes to check on him. I think it’s helping… he’s not sweating anymore, which is a sign of shock, although his skin’s still cool and pale…”

“I think it’s always like that.”

“Well, then, we won’t count those as symptoms. But yeah… it looks like replacing some of the blood loss is at least keeping him from getting any worse.”

Steve looked over at her. “Did Fury really say he could stay?”

“As long as we’re responsible for him.”

He smiled. “I think he’ll be glad to hear that. But what if Odin decides to push to get him back to Asgard?”

Natasha grinned. “I didn’t tell you that part? Fury called me back about an hour ago. Apparently Odin, for some totally unknown reason, doesn’t want to deal with Midgard anymore, and Frigga has informed Fury that she is now Asgard’s official representative in all business with Midgard.”

“Huh. What’s Fury think about that?”

“He wants to know what Odin’s so pissed about. But there’s not much he can say.”

“I’m guessing there was a really, really nasty argument when Frigga got home after finding out Odin tried to kill her son,” Steve said. “And I don’t think she’s someone you pick a fight with if you can help it. Kind of like you.”

She smiled and touched his shoulder. “Have JARVIS get me if you need anything. I’ll be around.”

Steve nodded and sat back in his chair, hearing the door close. After a few minutes, he sipped at the coffee and slid his chair closer to the bed. 

“JARVIS? Anyone likely to be showing up here any time soon?”

“According to her usual patterns of behavior Agent Romanov will not return unless you call her. Mr. Stark and Dr. Banner are both asleep and I am not scheduled to wake them for several hours. And Agent Barton and Thor are… occupied and it appears that they will be for some time, after which according to their usual patterns of behavior they will probably either go to sleep or go to the kitchen.”

“Thanks.”

He pulled his sketchbook out from under the nightstand and flipped it open to the drawing he’d been working on earlier. This was the first time since he’d met Loki that he’d stayed still long enough for Steve to sketch him. And Natasha was right; he did look less ill and more like he was sleeping. Steve took his pencil and picked up where he’d left off, filling in the dark shadows of Loki’s hair against the pillow and against his pale skin, the hollows of his closed eyes, the contours of his cheekbones. 

“What are you doing?”

Steve looked up, startled. Loki hadn’t moved, but his eyes were open and looking over at him. 

“Drawing. You’re awake.”

“Barely,” Loki muttered, “Although this isn’t what I expected.”

Steve flushed and shoved the sketchbook aside. “I’m sorry. That was rude. I…”

“Not that, you fool. Being here. In this room. Alive.”

“Oh. We weren’t sure… do you remember what happened?”

“I remember seeing the Binding Serpent and realizing that only my father could have sent it, and that he sent it for me. I must have imagined it, because if it had truly been the weapon I thought it to be, none of you would have had the power to remove it.”

“We didn’t,” Steve said. “Frigga did.”

Loki turned his head, green eyes bright and puzzled. “She did?”

“We’d tried just about everything. And then she showed up and cut it off.”

Loki frowned. “Odin would not have allowed her…”

“Sometimes a mother seeing her child’s life in danger will fight anyone and everything to save them,” Steve said. “She wasn’t going to let you die. She’s fighting for you.”

“She’s not my mother,” Loki murmured, letting his eyes drift closed. 

“From the look on her face when she saw that thing on you, I’m going to say that she’s pretty sure she is.”

A hint of a smile twitched at the corner of Loki’s mouth. “Perhaps.”

“I guess she’s declared herself our new official contact with Asgard.”

“Odin would never allow that.”

“What if she threatened to let everyone in Asgard… and maybe your biological relatives too… find out that Odin unleashed that kind of weapon on you, and was so underhanded that he sent a bounty hunter to do the dirty work for him?”

Loki grinned. “Oh… allow me one moment to savor the thought of his face as she told him that.”

Steve chuckled. “I’m guessing that’s not information he wanted getting out.”

“No. I’m quite certain he does not. But if she now controls Asgard’s contact with this world…”

“Odin has no power to try to negotiate to have you sent back, unless Frigga participates, which she won’t. So even if Odin had been planning to try to use legitimate diplomacy to get you returned to Asgard as a war criminal, that order would have to come from her now. And I don’t see that happening.”

Loki glanced over at him. “So… am I to return to my hotel and spend the rest of my life roaming Midgard and trying to stay out of trouble?”

“You can if you want,” Steve said, “but the rooms here are a lot nicer, from what I’ve heard.”

“I can’t stay here.”

“Fury says you can.”

“What? How?”

“Thank Natasha next time you see her. I don’t know how, but she talked him into it. You’re our responsibility now. If you turn around and wreck everything, it’s on us. If you want to stay here and fight on our team…”

“Your team would have me?”

“They barely tolerate each other half the time. You’ll fit right in.”

He saw a brightness flash in Loki’s eyes as if curtains had suddenly been pulled aside. 

“I don’t have to go back to Asgard.”

“No.”

“And I will not be a prisoner.”

“Not unless you do something to earn it, no.”

“Then I am free to choose my own fate?”

“I don’t see why not.”

Loki shifted. “I want to sit up. I want to…”

Steve pressed him back down. “Stay there. You still need to rest.”

“How do you know?”

“Well, for starters, you’ve still got those all over you,” Steve said, pointing to the puncture wounds. 

“Those,” Loki muttered dismissively, waving his hand, and the marks vanished. “Is that better?”

“Definitely. So what did you want to do?”

Loki’s hand shot out and pulled him toward the bed, and a moment later he was locked in a kiss that seemed to burn through every part of his body. When he finally managed to draw back enough to breathe, Loki was looking up at him with an all-too-familiar smirk. 

“I want to express my gratitude, Captain. In every possible way I can think of. And considering that I am a shape-shifter, there are ways you haven’t even thought about yet.”

“Umm. Can we just stick with the things you do in this particular shape for now?”

Loki grinned. “That limits me to some degree, but there are still many, many options. Perhaps you will allow me to demonstrate some of them.”

Steve looked over at the IV line in Loki’s arm and the traces of the two larger wounds still visible on his neck, and the protectiveness managed to throw some cold water on the fire Loki’s suggestions were sparking. 

“Not till Bruce checks on you and you eat something.”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

Loki scowled. “You are a ridiculous, over-protective, ignorant, impossible mortal who understands absolutely nothing.”

“And we’re still not doing anything until Bruce checks on you and you eat something.”

“Fine,” Loki sighed, waving his hand and slumping back to the pillows. “If I must eat something, I desire a grilled cheese sandwich.”

“A grilled…”

“You heard me. The diner across the street from the hotel served them as their Tuesday lunch special, and I like them. Make me one and I will consider forgiving you for rejecting my advances.”

“Tea with your sandwich?”

He sighed dramatically. “If I must. And when will Dr. Banner be here to pronounce me well enough for recreation?”

“Whenever he wakes up.”

“Well, wake him up!”

Steve grinned. “Later. I’ve got sandwiches to make. And you’re lucky, because I make a pretty good grilled cheese sandwich.”

Loki muttered something under his breath that sounded vaguely insulting. Steve stepped out into the hall and headed toward the kitchen, hoping Tony hadn’t decided to try out some sort of bizarre “upgrade” on the stove.

 

 

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	39. Chapter 39

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> All done. The End. Thank you very much for reading, and if there are more stories you want to read, feel free to let me know, but this is the end of the forty-chapter ones for now. This will remain its own AU and I will still write things in it if you want to read them, but with the new movie looming and the spoilers spilling, it seems like a good time to tidy up the loose ends of this part and stick to some shorter things for now. As always, I'd love to know what you want to read and will try to make that happen. 
> 
> .  
> .  
> .

Steve found Clint and Thor in the kitchen, both looking very disheveled and both barefoot, which sent a though through the back of Steve’s mind that it was a good thing Tony wasn’t awake yet, because if he didn’t like bare feet in the rest of the tower he definitely wasn’t going to like them in the kitchen. Clint was spreading peanut butter on toast while Thor leaned against the counter and watched, absently attempting to comb some of the impressive knots out of his hair with his fingers. 

“You guys mind if I use the stove?” Steve asked. 

“Go for it,” Clint said. “Peanut butter toast is as ambitious as I’m getting right now.”

Steve reached into the cabinet for a skillet and glanced at Thor. “It kind of looks like your head was attacked by squirrels.”

Thor grinned. “My little Hawk has a very tight grip. And he seems to like my hair.”

Clint scowled at him and waved the peanut butter knife threateningly. Steve shook his head and tried not to think about Loki’s sleek hair. 

“You’re supposed to get all uptight and embarrassed,” Clint said. 

Steve shrugged. 

“Come on,” Clint prodded. “You were getting laid before. And it’s not like Natasha’s a prude. So I know it’s not…”

“Has the term ‘mind your own business’ ever even been spoken in this tower before?” Steve asked. 

“If it was, it was probably a joke,” Clint said. “Besides, I’m a spy. Knowing things is my job.”

“Natasha is the spy, and knowing things is her job,” Steve said. “If you were half as good at spying as her, you wouldn’t have to ask me these things.”

Thor laughed, and Clint glared. 

“Would you like me to get some beverages from the refrigerator, little Hawk?”

“Yeah. Fine. Whatever.”

He snatched up the two plates of toast and vanished. Steve glanced at Thor. 

“Sorry. Did I say something I shouldn’t have said?”

Thor chuckled. “No. He knows perfectly well Natasha is the master spy among us. He just dislikes being reminded of it.”

“Oh. Well, then, he should quit trying to know everything everyone is doing.”

“That is true,” Thor said, reaching into the refrigerator. “I assume that since you are here in the kitchen, my brother is not in immediate danger?”

“He’s awake,” Steve said, “and he wants a grilled cheese sandwich. Well… that’s not what he wanted, but that’s what he’s getting.”

Thor raised an eyebrow. “Be wary, friend. My brother is accustomed to a life where no kindness is free and where all debts must be paid, even if the transactions are unspoken.”

“I figured,” Steve said. “That’s why I’m here making sandwiches instead of doing what he was adamant we should be doing instead. This isn’t going to become a thing where he owes me. I’m not going to let it.”

Thor slapped Steve on the back, beaming. “Excellent. Then I will go and enjoy my toast. Thank you, and tell my brother that if he wishes I will come and look in on him later.”

He headed off toward the elevator, and Steve looked at his knotted hair and then grabbed for his cell phone and sent Natasha a quick text message. 

 

 

 

 

Bruce blinked and yawned and looked around for a clock, but Tony had apparently knocked it off the nightstand. The room was dark, but considering that this was Tony’s room and he’d installed curtains that completely blocked the sunlight, that didn’t tell him much. 

“What?” Tony muttered. 

“I was trying to see what time it was.”

“Fuck it. Sleep.”

“We have things to do…”

“We don’t have things to do right this second,” Tony said. 

“What about Loki? I should check his IV and…”

“JARVIS? Status report on Loki.”

“Sir, Loki is fully conscious, has removed his IV line, and is awaiting the grilled cheese sandwich that Captain Rogers is preparing for him.”

“See? Shut up and go back to sleep.”

Bruce laid his head back down on the pillow, but his eyes wouldn’t close. After a minute, he felt Tony’s arm lazily drape over his side. 

“I gotta do something to put you back to sleep?”

“Hmph. Maybe,” he said, realizing that apparently his cock thought this was an excellent idea even before his brain had responded to it.

“JARVIS, raise the lights to twenty percent.”

The room filled with a warm, pleasant glow. 

“I’m surprised you can’t find everything in the dark by now,” Bruce said. 

Tony chuckled. “Maybe I like to look at you.”

Bruce glanced over his shoulder at him. “Why?”

“Umm… because you’re attractive?”

“Whatever. I’ve seen the kind of people you usually sleep with.”

Tony grabbed him by the shoulder and rolled him until they were face to face. 

“No,” he said firmly. “You’ve seen the people I fucked once or twice. The only time you’re going to see someone I sleep with and let into my lab and fuck every chance I get because I can’t keep my hands off him is if you look in the mirror.”

“Oh,” Bruce murmured. “Well, you’re all right too, but you already know that.”

“Gifted with innate self-confidence,” Tony said. 

“Hiding behind a wall of arrogance?” 

“That too. The first one works better for public appearances. But it doesn’t matter here and if I didn’t think you were incredibly desirable, I wouldn’t desire you all the damn time and I wouldn’t be thinking about you when I’m supposed to be thinking about arc reactors or hydraulics for the suit or new arrows for Clint, and I wouldn’t be constantly wondering when I’ll get to have my hands on you again.”

Bruce grinned. “Sorry if I’m messing up your routine.”

“You’re part of my new routine. It’s nicer than the old one… just takes some getting used to,” he said, sliding his hand down to stroke his fingers along Bruce’s cock. Bruce’s head fell forward against Tony’s shoulder as he exhaled. 

“The Other Guy is part of it too, you know.”

Bruce sighed. “He’s…”

“He’s you. You’re not separate people. He doesn’t want to hurt me. And he understands at this point that if he came out when he shouldn’t, he would hurt people he likes.”

“He seems to. But then there’s times when it feels like he’s a lot closer to the surface than I’d like him to be.”

“But he’s not pushing to get out, is he?”

“No. I think he’s just watching. I think he just… wants to be part of things.”

“That’s not a bad thing.”

“It might make him easier to trigger.”

“I think it means he’s learning how to be closer to the outside world without being triggered,” Tony said. 

“He’s still…”

Tony rolled his eyes. “You’re not listening and I’m actually trying to talk without being an asshole. It’s very annoying. I’m trying to… now you’ve got me all messed up. I’m trying to tell you that you’re him, and he’s you, and I love you, so that means I love him…”

Bruce looked back at him with such a blank expression that Tony had to review what he’d just said. 

“Umm… was that bad?”

Bruce shook his head. 

“You look like I just gave you an electric shock.”

“Something like that.”

“I won’t say it if…”

“I love you too.”

“Oh. Well, then.”

“And the Other Guy is pretty fond of you too,” Bruce said, as he pulled Tony closer, and in the dim light Tony could see the hints of green sparking through Bruce’s dark eyes. “And he wants you. He knows he can’t have you himself, but he likes being here with me when we…”

“Good. He can be here. He should be here. He’s part of you. We’re not afraid of him. He’s not a monster. He can be here with us and not hurt anyone. Right, Big Guy?”

Bruce kissed him, hooking a leg over Tony’s hip to pull him in, and Tony swore he could feel the Other Guy shifting somewhere under the surface of Bruce’s skin, but rather than alarming, the feeling was almost comforting, knowing that the Hulk could be so close and yet so content to stay in the background and be part of Bruce instead of fighting him. 

“He’s part of us,” Tony murmured. 

“He’s happy,” Bruce whispered, pressing his head to Tony’s shoulder. “I can… he’s happy.”

“You okay?”

Bruce looked up at him. “Better than I’ve been in a really long time, actually.”

“Good. Because I have somebody down here under the covers that’s also really happy and he’s getting really impatient that he hasn’t gotten to join the party yet and…”

“You are the absolute master of ruining a moment, Tony.”

“I know. I have a trophy.”

 

 

 

Thor arrived in his room to find Clint sitting on the dresser, chewing on a piece of toast. Considering that the dresser was the highest point in the room, and that when Clint was looking for a perch it generally meant he was in a bad mood, Thor settled himself down on the bed and waited. 

“What?” Clint demanded. 

“You are displeased. I would hope you have the good sense not to be bothered by Captain Steve’s comment about Natasha’s superior spying capabilities…”

“Fuck off.”

“You know that isn’t helpful.”

Clint scowled at him. “Maybe I’m not in the mood to be helpful.”

“You were in an excellent mood before our encounter with Captain Steve,” Thor said. “In fact, you were in an unusually generous and contemplative mood…”

“Yeah, well… now I’m not.”

“I see that,” Thor said, amused. “I am attempting to recall what might have put you in such a bad temper, but I cannot think of anything, unless he mentioned something about my brother that irked you…”

Clint rolled his eyes. 

“Is it my brother and Captain Steve together that irk you?” Thor asked. 

“Maybe.”

Thor frowned, his humor vanishing. “You told me you wanted nothing more of Loki. I cannot…”

Clint relented. “It isn’t anything like that.”

He hopped off the dresser and sat down on the bed, handing Thor a piece of toast. 

“I told you I didn’t want anything like that with Loki and I meant it,” he said. “We had… things to figure out. For me, they’re figured out. I’m done.”

“Then what…”

Clint brushed crumbs off the blanket. “You’re a demigod… alien… whatever. Not human. So is Loki. And Steve’s a super soldier who’s probably almost as strong as you guys. And I’m not.”

“I see.”

“Well, what’s it mean if Loki gets someone who can… you know. Someone where it’s something like a fair trade… and you just get me?”

Thor sighed. “Have I not made it clear you are more than enough, little Hawk?”

“I’m not, though. I’m not strong enough to give you…”

“You give me everything I desire. My desires are not the same as my brother’s. They are not the same as yours. For much longer than you can imagine, I have desired someone who would love me for who I was, and not the king I was to become, or the power I wielded. Someone who was not impressed with any of those things, and saw someone worthy of love even without them. You do not care about my hammer. You do not care if I wear a crown one day. Whatever we are together, it is only between you and I, and we have only each other to please. And I am very content, my friend.”

“You won’t always be, though,” Clint said. “Steve won’t get old like I will. He’ll get old faster than Loki, but not like me… I’ll be an old man…”

“And I will still love you.”

“I won’t be able to… I’ll get old, and I’ll die, and you won’t even have a new wrinkle.”

Thor reached out and ran his fingers through Clint’s hair. “Those are worries for tomorrow. There is no cause for them. We may fight together and die together tomorrow, or any day after that. I am not immortal. I could die tomorrow and you could live. It matters not. There is only today.”

“Yeah, but…”

Thor smiled. “No arguments.”

Clint shrugged. “I’d kiss you, but your beard is full of toast crumbs.”

“Such is life. If every kiss might be our last, little Hawk, I will enjoy every one just as much as the one before.”

“Even with toast crumbs?”

“You have peanut butter on your nose.”

“Damnit…”

Thor grinned and wiped it off and brushed most of the crumbs out of his beard. “Perhaps we will need a shower.”

“Doesn’t sound like a terrible idea,” Clint admitted, shoving the last of his toast in his mouth. “Let’s go.”

 

 

 

 

 

Steve arrived back in his room holding a tray of grilled cheese sandwiches and iced tea, with a bottle of Natasha’s shampoo under one arm and her condition under the other; she’d been mildly amused by the request and prodded him a bit about his fascination with attractive hair, but not as badly as he’d expected.

Loki wasn’t in his bed, but the bathroom door was open and the light was on. Steve set down the tray on the table. 

“Hello?”

“Your guest is in the bathroom, Captain,” JARVIS said. 

“Yeah. I kind of figured,” Steve muttered. 

He looked in to find Loki sitting on the floor with a towel wrapped around his waist, head resting on his knees. Before Steve could say anything, though, he looked up, dark shadows under his eyes that he’d clearly been hiding earlier. 

“I’m sorry if I alarmed you.”

“Are you okay?”

“It seems that healing my assortment of minor injuries sapped more of my strength than I had initially expected…”

Steve shook his head and extended his hand. “Still want that sandwich?”

“I do.”

He pulled Loki to his feet, then grabbed him by the shoulders to steady him when he swayed slightly. Loki brushed him off, annoyed. 

“I need no assistance.”

“You’re not allowed to use your magic to fake things again.”

Loki raised an eyebrow. “Who made this rule?”

“Me. You’re not allowed to use magic to make it look like you’re all right when you’re not. That isn’t fair. You’ll always be able to tell if something’s wrong with me. It’s only fair if I know you’re not hiding it from me.”

Loki smiled bitterly. “Captain, don’t you know that a wounded animal always hides its weakness because the hunters are always watching?”

Steve led him back out into the bedroom and sat down across the table from him. Loki studied the pile of sandwiches with bright eyes. 

“You assumed I would eat all of these?”

“One’s for me,” Steve said. “And I figured I should play it safe, since Thor would eat about twenty of them.”

“Thor is a crude glutton,” Loki muttered, but said nothing else for the length of time it took him to devour the rest of the sandwiches with an enthusiasm that rivaled his brother’s. Steve watched, sipping his iced tea, until the plate was empty and Loki leaned back in his chair, looking pleased. 

“I will admit that you do make a very good grilled cheese sandwich.”

“Thanks.”

Loki studied his long fingers, slick with butter from the sandwiches, and Steve silenced the thought of how interesting it would be to watch him lick them clean. 

“Thought you might like a shower,” he said. “I know you’re making it look like your hair’s perfect and there’s no blood on you, but you’re tricking me, so why don’t you just stop?”

Loki sighed and waved his hand, and the illusion of sleek hair and unmarked skin faded into the unwashed strands and streaks of dried blood Steve had known were there. 

“I would enjoy a shower.”

“You can use these…” Steve said. “I got them from Natasha because she always has the prettiest hair. I mean, Tony probably uses more stuff in his, but hers is always the shiniest.”

Loki grinned. “You must think me terribly vain.”

“Maybe it’s not just for you,” Steve said, reaching over to run his fingers through Loki’s hair. 

“Hmm. I had not thought of that.”

He picked up the bottles and headed back toward the bathroom, looking considerably steadier after his meal. If his towel dropped to the floor halfway there, it probably wasn’t an accident, but Steve made himself wait at least a minute or two before sliding out of his chair and following him. 

 

 

 

 

Clint wasn’t sure when or how they ended up back in bed, or how the collar ended up around his neck, but he knew that with the feeling of the soft leather and the cool metal buckle against his skin, he didn’t have to think about anything. He let Thor wrap an arm around him and pull him back to lean against his chest, nipping along the edge of the collar just to hear Clint gasp and feel him shiver. 

“He looks good like that,” a familiar voice said. 

Thor hummed his agreement against Clint’s skin and tightened his grip. The fingers that slid across the leather and up to stroke along his cheek were small and slender, with neatly shaped nails. 

“Didn’t think I’d ever see him let anybody claim him like that,” she murmured. 

Thor chuckled. “Little Hawk, tell her who you belong to.”

“Yours,” Clint answered, without thought or even comprehension. 

“Ours,” Natasha said, leaning in to press a kiss to his cheek. “You’re still mine, too, you know. You’ll always be mine.”

“Thought you said…”

“That was before.”

“Before what?”

“Before this. Before the team. Before all of us started to get put back together.”

“Is that what this is?” Clint asked, opening his eyes. 

“It must be something like that,” she said, smiling at him. “Have you looked at all of us lately?”

“I thought we were all a bunch of mentally unstable social rejects.”

“Well, that hasn’t changed. But it doesn’t matter so much anymore.”

Thor bit rather sharply at the back of Clint’s neck, reminding him where his attention was supposed to be, and as he let himself slip back down he heard Natasha and Thor talking over his head about something that didn’t matter, and that he didn’t need to listen to, because he trusted them, and he belonged to them, and they would take care of him, always. 

 

 

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	40. Chapter 40

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Future of "Various Definitions" and Such Things
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I had planned to write a third long and involved part of the "Various Definitions" series, and even managed to get a chapter or two posted. But I'm now working on a Master's degree full-time, and also working random afternoons, evenings, and nights at The Massive Retail Outlet That Shall Not Be Named, and I unfortunately know that there is no possibility of maintaining any kind of consistent posting schedule, or even putting anything like a reasonable story together (like the other ones were SOOOOO reasonable, right?). 

So I'm adding this because I wanted to let the people who are subscribed to or reading this series know what's going on. 

I don't want to abandon it, and I'd like to have some motivation to occasionally write something that belongs in this AU. I'd also like the chance to give something to some of the awesome and wonderful people who followed this series through literally years and many, many chapters. 

Please, if there's a brief story idea or just a thought that you'd like to see written, leave it in the comments on this chapter. I will respond to them and I will keep a list and try to write them for you, when I can. It doesn't matter if you're reading this the day I post it or months and months from now.

All I ask is that your ideas/suggestions/requests fit with what's happened in the series so far and the characters that are already involved, and I'm probably not going to create any pairings that haven't happened (or sort of happened or almost happened) already. In other words, Bucky isn't going to make an appearance (sorry) and neither are any of the other MCU characters I haven't included so far (unless you convince me otherwise!). 

In summary, you are all wonderful, and I'd like to add short (single-chapter) stories to the series as I get the chance, and I'm asking for your ideas and requests. My only specification is that said ideas and requests are consistent with the series so far and the characters and pairings involved. What you'd like to see happen to them, or if there's a scene from their part that you'd like to see, or just some smut that you feel is necessary, this is the place to let me know!

Thank you, and I'm sorry I have no ability to write or post consistently (and probably won't for the next two years or so), but I hope that for those of you who are still here or have just arrived, we can still have some fun. 

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